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The first idea was to provide a service which would host images of email addresses. This is one effective way of letting real people know your real email address while making it very difficult for spam-bots to harvest such email addresses. Very soon after I thought of developing this anti-spam project with a few other services. The one that followed very soon was the temporary email service. During this first year of emailsensei the email image service had a constant but low usage while the temporary email service grew slowly but constantly. The number of users of either services is not extremely high but rather decent. On the other hand the spam volume has grown fast and if the growth rate remains the same another year from now the spam volume will get mythical proportions.

When you start such a project you always hope of bringing something good and useful to the world but you also wouldn’t mind making some money with it. While people enjoy using these services and I enjoy their joy of using these services, emailsensei.com did not bring a single cent so far – and I think this is rather sad. We do have a “donate” button in the footer of every page and we also accept donations for our Firefox extension through Mozilla Add-ons site. But no donation has come so far.

The sad reality of today is that people use lots of free software and free services but the vast majority don’t feel the responsibility of giving something back. Perhaps the most notable example is Twitter – they are still looking for ways of monetizing their project as well; in other words they are on the minus side as well. This literally pushes such services into the hands of those who finance it. In the capitalist world people used to “vote” directly a product by buying it and thus financing its’ production. In the internet world everything must come for free and the all-mighty financiers (who sometimes remain obscure) choose what stays up and what doesn’t. I was hoping in a more flexible and democratic way by which people would “vote” by donating a small amount of money from time to time – just as much as they think this service is worth for them compared to their income or financial power. Apparently this is either impossible or I would like to think that maybe its’ time has not yet come.

Of course there are other means of monetizing a project. One of them is putting ads. This still leaves the decision into the hands of some obscure people and not in the hands of the users. Direct selling of ads is not a real option for emailsensei simply because I don’t have the time or energy to manage this. I tried using AdBrite but they offered only non-relevant commercials with very low CTR until they decided that this type of service is not for them altogether – they don’t like email sites or something like that. I have also applied to Google AdSense about a year ago and they just kept on telling me that they would analyze my application in about a week or so. Nearly a year has passed and it will still take about a week or so. So hurray for Google – another company with many free services sponsored by obscure hands.

Before I started this project I used to use temporary email services from another site which suddenly decided to close down and try to sell the domain. After a year of emailsensei I can see why – after all hosting doesn’t pay by itself and the time used to develop this service will never come back. Nevertheless I’m not giving up just yet and I’m still happy that emailsensei helps more and more people.

While we chose for some other projects to go with 4 servers we decided to keep emailsensei to just one server for now due to the “special” nature of this service. As you have probably noticed, during the last month we had many interruptions of emailsensei. We do apologize for this. This is also part of the reason why we chose to keep it to one Tronkle server for now: we don’t want to prolong this interruption period. So from now on everything is up and running smooth.

First of all the average number of emails per inbox for the last month is 12.2. When looking at this number you should know 2 things:

1. a service such as emailsensei is usually used for registering with various websites; all websites require a valid email address nowadays and many people are not comfortable with giving away their real day-to-day email address – and looking at the numbers we can see why

2. a service such as emailsensei should be used with a different user id (inbox) for each site; it’s a security risk to use the same emailsensei email address twice and we discourage it

Considering the 2 things above we can safely assume that a emailsensei inbox is unique per user-website combination. Of course this is not entirely true but it’s a very good approximation of the status quo. This means that each site where an emailsensei user registers sends on average 12.2 emails to the user. In other words we save our users from 12.2 unwanted emails per month for each site where the user registers. We can consider 1 or 2 emails as legitimate but we’ll still have about 10 emails which can qualify as spam (at least morally if not technically – see the “voluntary” newsletter registration and other such techniques).

We also took a look at the average number of emails per inbox per day and this number goes as high as 20. And remember: this is still an average and per day. This means that some websites actually do send more than 20 emails worth of spam which is a pretty high number considering the efforts put into spam legislation and counter-measures during the last decade.

One last interesting thing we have noticed was that the average number of emails per inbox tends to grow with the number of inboxes.

We really appreciate any feedback regarding the extension or our services. Please help us improve by leaving a comment and rating for emailsensei extension at Mozilla addons.

The remedy to this is to use a temporary email address provided by emailsensei whenever you need to provide a real email address but you don’t want to give your real email. You can use the address randomly generated on emailsensei homepage or you could use any other string with a minimum length of 16 characters (although these restrictions may change anytime without prior notice) as you temporary emailsensei.com address. You then paste the address wherever you’re required to provide a real email address and check the inbox to see whatever messages you might have received.

This way you get rid of spam easily but there are some downsides. First of all anyone knowing your temporary email address can see the messages you receive on that address because there’s no authentication (which makes the service more anonymous and easier to use) . This is why the minimum length of an address is currenlty 16 and you can only see the messages received during the last 24 hours – it would be practically impossible to guess an email address that was in use during the last 24 hours.

The second drawback is that you will have to remember the email address if you will later need to receive emails from the website where you registered with this particular email address. For example if you ever forget your password for that website they might send you an email with a new password – you would then have to know the temporary email so that you can see the password. Your password would also be visible for 24 hours to anyone knowing of this temporary email address of yours.

However it really sounds worse than it really is because this is like saying that anyone knowing your password could access your email because this temporary email address acts like a password because of it’s length so it might be even more secure than your real email account if used properly because I doubt that you have a 16 characters long password for your real email account

The third drawback is that you can’t send email from the temporary email address – the service is receive only – sorry for all the  spammers reading this

The service is currently in beta testing so we expect lots of failures and very limited functionality. It doesn’t support attachments or any fancy mambo-jumbo. The idea was to keep it simply plaintext and classic html. I would personally expect it to have troubles with various smtp implementations out in the wild. The bottom line is you might not want to rely on it but we will surely appreciate it if you would help us test it.

You now have a very powerful anti-spam solution with emailsensei.com: if you need to publish your real email address you can do it with a secure image so that you won’t get harvested by spam bots and if you need to provide a real email address but to someone you don’t want to hear from you can use a temporary email address that will be useful just for that.

We are also working on providing the emailsensei functionality in an extremely simple and easy to use Firefox extension. This way it would be even more simple to use our services and prevent spam.

Many people write their email addresses in silly ways just to escape the spam-bots: using at, a-t, a t instead of @ is pretty popular. You can also spell your email backwards and tell people to read it backwards. These techniques were probably efficient first but right now they’re old news and pretty easy to circumvent by spam-bots. That’s why you should use a sevice like emailsensei.com

The idea may not be brand new but we tried pushing things to the next level. There are some sites (not many) that already provide similar services. Some of them do not provide links to the generated images, other do not offer customizations. We tried combining all benefits into a service that will be easy to use and customizable to suit everyones’ needs. We also tried to combine security with ease of use because putting text in an image is not secure by default or in other words: not all images are equal when it comes to securing the text inside them.

So here it is: the service is now in public beta and we try to spread the word. We count on your help too. We also have a number of more features in mind that we will implement if the service becomes popular. So stay tuned and keep using emailsensei.com – give spam a fight.