RSStrashmail.net may be a scam
Sep 10
Marketing Comments Off
I’ve seen a disturbing trend … people have been signing up to various sites I own with a new service called “trashmail.net”. They are presumably a mail forwarding service, so you can hide your real email address.
[There are millions of ways to accomplish the same thing, without compromising your messages.]
The problem is that you have no clue what this service is doing with the mail being sent through it.
Or do you?
If you look at the headers of emails sent when using this service, you can see exactly what they are doing … they are forwarding all the messages through “archivum.info”, which is a “made for Google Adsense” email archive.
Presumably they are storing a copy before sending it on, though I have not yet been able to verify this.
Note: both sites are run by the same company: FERRARO Ltd., out of Germany. And their privacy policy is basically .. :
4. PRIVACY
TrashMail.net is subject to the german laws and is not an anonymous service.
(i.e., there is none)
Trade one kind of spam … messages sent to your inbox, unsolicited … for another kind of spam … your messages being displayed to the whole world, with an adsense box next to them so this company can get paid.
No thank you.
It seems right now, some mail being sent to archivum.info is bouncing … so the site may / may not be fully operational. But you never know when your mail may start showing up there.
Even their “support” email, which is used to “opt out” (like I ever opted in), is bouncing.
This is being run by German company, so in theory a U.S. citizen (or any non-German citizen) would have absolutely no recourse if they do come back up and start displaying the mail. I’ll be first to admit I don’t have a clue about International law … but I also know that they could get a server in [name a country] if things don’t work out there.
And that’s a lesson: DON’T ever trust your mail to a company that you can’t verify. Period.
I actually communicate with my customers, on and off list. That means these private communications could be archived, as well.
As a site owner, seeing that people don’t have enough respect for me to use a real email address (even a free gmail or yahoo account) when asking for my products, services and advice actually pisses me off (excuse the english).
I take a lot of care to respect my customers – their time, their wishes, their needs … I expect a modicum of respect in return.
The Internet is fraught with perils, the most serious one being trust. How do you trust a website?
How can a website owner trust their subscribers?
I’m afraid there are no really good answers, but using trashmail.net is NOT the way to start a good relationship with me.
And I’ll be banning it from all my correspondence – trashmail is literally going to the trash.