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.

Nonetheless Scr.im offers a good service to mask e-mail addresses and protect from spam.

Whats a Disposable or a Temporary ID?
These e-mail addresses are created only for a limited period of time(optional), at the time of creation user can chose the validity period of the e-mail address which starts from 1 hours to virtually unlimited period of time. These e-mail addresses can be terminated at any time OR you can also chose to extend the validity period of the address. This services proves to be very helpful in keeping SPAM away from your personal ID.

Few of these services make it really easy for the users to get a temp ID by serving up a randomly available ID on the homepage for immediate registration.

Here is a list of services where you can signup for a Temporary e-mail ID:

• MailExpire
• Mailinator
• TemporaryInbox
• TrashMail
• ZoeMail
• Spamex
• Spamgourmet

Keep SPAM off your Inbox!