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.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
People don’t have to trust me, if they don’t they can simply not contact me or not subscribe to my services.
When a company that has _no_ privacy policy whatsoever (“regulated under German laws” means diddly – especially outside of Germany) – then rewrites the headers and possibly other parts of my correspondence without my permission or even knowledge (which my actually be illegal in the U.S – faking headers), it is not a service I welcome in my space.
I take it personally when I’m cussed by a subscriber when it’s their service that is causing the problems. Simple solution is to ban the service from my systems, and let other people know to be wary.
Which I have done.
Why in the world do you expect people to trust YOU? Why do you take it personally when people who don’t know you, would rather not give you their real e-mail address? You’re way off base on this one.
There may be responses to each point, everyone is entitled to handling their lives as they wish. I got ticked because I had one user who used the system, didn’t realize what it was doing, and caused hours of support trying to figure out what the hell was going on … the fact that all my outgoing stuff was getting munged didn’t help any.
I just appreciate it if the people I do business with respect me enough to use real contact info. Others may have a different view … and they can shop someplace else.
There is an explanation for every point you write in your blog and in this comments. Really, check out the forum on trashmail.net: https://ssl.trashmail.net/forum/
The community is really open to any kind of suggestion or questions.
Archivum.info runs on the same server as trashmail.net. Its explains why you see this in the header.
Trashmail does not save your email content.
There is also no plan to make a web archive of your emails. This would be strictly forbidden in Germany. The dataprotection laws are very strict in Germany (much more than in US).
If you really are scarred about this, use GnuPG anyway. Don’t forget that Gmail archives your mails forever.
Supplemental: Note that what really pissed me off was that trashmail caused the “archiving” problem by _rewriting_ the headers of my outgoing emails (changing my “From” address to some unique_id@trashmail) before forwarding them. If that’s not illegal (in the U.S., I think header foragery actually believe is illegal) it should be.
Robert – my experience is a little different. I had someone contact me with a return address of trashmail, and all (personal) correspondance ended up going through the trashmail servers – not even the customer was aware this was happening until I pointed it out to them.
Emailing their support department for “opt out” resulted in a bounced message.
And … I’m not worried about “illegal” activities, I’m more worried about “legal but over-the-top” activities – especially with no privacy policy to speak of.
*I* did not sign up for their service, so my mail should not be archived by them.
If it works for you, that’s great … just please don’t sign up to my sites with their address, as it will be blocked.
1. Only serious sites give out their real company name and addresses. TrashMail is the only one which is serious. You have all kind of legal information on their website. They could also be pursued in Germany if they do illegal activities.
2. You say: “And that’s a lesson: DON’T ever trust your mail to a company that you can’t verify. Period.” So you trust Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Co. ?
3. You say: “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.” This is not correct. Germany is a full democractic country where international laws applies. Dataprotection is much more strict in Germany than in USA.
I do not see any kind of problem with TrashMail.net. It works well for years.
Nick, that sounds more than dangerous, rather like the anonymous comments I somtimes receive on my blog.
You mentioned “There are millions of ways to accomplish the same thing, without compromising your messages.” What are some of the “ways” you had in mind? How about 10minutemail.com or others of that ilk. I have, up to this time, use my regular email address but with spam being what it is I have been looking at options.