Use Scr.im to Keep SPAM Off Your Inbox!

Posted by Abbas ||

March 28, 2009 ||

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Scrim Scr.im is an intelligent service which lets share your e-mail address openly, without the fear of spammers spamming your inbox. Other ways of keeping the inbox from being spammed includes the usage of Temporary E-mail or Disposable E-mail Addresses.

It works on a simple concept of 1) masking your e-mail address by a customized URL which can be shared anywhere on the internet, and 2) confirming that the e-mail address is requested by a human and not a spam-bot.

Here is how it works..

Enter the e-mail address and a customized URL and click on “Protect my email”

Once your e-mail is protected, you can start using the customized URL on the internet to share your email address. My customized e-mail URL is http://scr.im/abbas, going forward I can use this URL on forums, chat rooms, etc.. to share my email address without the fear of being spammed.

To get the e-mail address from the link, users will have to confirm their existence as humans by performing a logical action as shown in the image below.

E-mail address is shows in case the users click on the correct rectangle with alphabets in it.

This reminds me of a story Zdnet ran couple of months ago, where they uncovered data processsing businesses based out of India charging $2 for every/cracking 1000 captchas [link]. If backfired, services like Scr.im will become easy target of the spammers and user e-mail address will no longer be safe or hidden from spammers.

A site search (site:scr.im) on Google shows that crawling and indexing of the customized URLs is not protected by robots.txt or by any other technique. Spammers can just pay a minimal amount to scan through the scr.im service and get access to thousands of e-mails. Even if the customized URLs are protected, spammers can scan the web and index scr.im URLs but it won’t be that simple.