I’m researching bookmarklets at the moment, and to me it’s an unsung corner of the browser world. But the more I look at them, the more frustrated I am that there aren’t more of them, or easier ways of making them.
For example, I use a lot of specific email addresses for registering on certain services. If I register at Blogg’s Cafe, for example, I’ll give them an email address of bloggscafe05@jeremywagstaff.com. This means I know who is giving away my email address if I get spammed, I can change the email address next year if I need to, I can remember easily what email address I used to register at that site, and I can block the address if I choose to. This was real easy before, since any email address at the domain in question that wasn’t preselected would go straight through to my usual inbox. My hosting service has however recently changed its approach, and unless an email address is registered, it will bounce. This may make sense if I’m getting deluged with spam — so spammers can’t just send anything to that domain in the hope of getting through — but it does mean I have to register an email address before I can use it anywhere. This is usally one too many steps for me, so I don’t bother as much as I used to.
This strikes me as a perfect opportunity for a bookmarklet. Select the page you want to register at, click the bookmarklet and it will extract the domain URL, add a year or some kind of code in there, zip over to your hosting control page, add the email address in question, zip back to the page you want to register at, add the email address and voila! Would that be possible, I wonder? Would it be easy? Is this pushing bookmarklets too far? (I can hear Buzz saying let ActiveWords do it, but I must confess my scripting skills aren’t up to it.)
Jeremy, That is exactly how I use Spam Gourmet. It all goes to one inbox at my web host, but everything is forwarded by Spam Gourmet. No need to “setup” an address with SG for everything — it works on-the-fly. Using your example, I would simply register ” bloggscafe.3.XXX@dfgh.net ” 3= number of emails before that address is killed (up to 20 I think). XXX= my personal SG mailbox name. dfgh.net is just another address used for Spam Gourmet. Everything going to that address is forwarded to my “real” email box. It has knocked spam dead for me. Spam Gourmet is such a simple service and you can’t beat the price – free. I know it’s not a bookmarklet, but does the same thing without need to “register” each and every email address.
This is conceptually similar to the MD5 password hashing bookmarklets.
There are different algorithms for this, but they usually take a “master password” and concatenate it to the site’s URL and then take the first x characters for use as a password.
This radically reduces the number of individual passwords to remember while pushing out unique values to all the different sites you might interact with.
Here’s one example:
http://www.angel.net/~nic/passwdlet.html