Guerrilla Mail is a free disposable email address service launched in 2006. Visitors are automatically assigned a random email address upon visiting the site.
Guerrilla Mail randomly generates disposable email addresses. [1] Disposable email addresses may be used as a means of spam prevention. [2] They may also be used if the user does not wish to give a real email, for example if they fear a data breach. Emails sent to addresses are kept for one hour before deletion. The site offers some choice of email domain names. [2] [3]
Guerrilla Mail was founded in 2006, in Chicago. [4]
Privacy-centered services saw an up-tick in public interest after the global surveillance disclosures beginning in 2013, especially concerning attention brought to materials leaked by Edward Snowden. According to The Mercury News in 2014, "[Guerrilla Mail] has done nearly half of its business in the past year". [4]
In December 2013, a Harvard College sophomore and Quincy House resident Eldo Kim used Guerrilla Mail to send a bomb threat to offices associated with Harvard, including the Harvard University Police Department and The Harvard Crimson , in order to delay a final exam. [5] [6] [7] It was alleged in an affidavit that the student accessed Guerrilla Mail through Tor, a fact that might've been given away in the IP address present in the email header. [8] [9]
In June 2017, it was revealed through court documents that the FBI used a social engineering technique known as phishing to target a Guerrilla Mail user. The case was unique, as it was the "first public example of the feds using a controversial update to a law allowing searches on users of anonymizing tools like Tor". [10] [11]
As of November 4, 2020, Guerrilla Mail stated on Twitter that their site had been taken down by their hosting provider, OVHCloud, due to a law enforcement request which OVHCloud refused to provide details about. [12]
However, as of August 20, 2023 sending email from Guerilla Mail is once again suspended. Visitors receive the same message "sending mail has been suspended for today". There X social media page says sending mail is suspended until further notice. https://x.com/GuerrillaMail/status/1693224645577576796
Electronic mail is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.
A bomb threat or bomb scare is a threat, usually verbal or written, to detonate an explosive or incendiary device to cause property damage, death, injuries, and/or incite fear, whether or not such a device actually exists.
A Domain Name System blocklist, Domain Name System-based blackhole list, Domain Name System blacklist (DNSBL) or real-time blackhole list (RBL) is a service for operation of mail servers to perform a check via a Domain Name System (DNS) query whether a sending host's IP address is blacklisted for email spam. Most mail server software can be configured to check such lists, typically rejecting or flagging messages from such sites.
A whitelist or allowlist is a list or register of entities that are being provided a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. Entities on the list will be accepted, approved and/or recognized. Whitelisting is the reverse of blacklisting, the practice of identifying entities that are denied, unrecognised, or ostracised.
An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by RFC 5322 and 6854. The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group. A mailbox value can be either a name-addr, which contains a display-name and addr-spec, or the more common addr-spec alone.
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic.
A Joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early Joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives: build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
The Spamhaus Project is an international organisation based in the Principality of Andorra, founded in 1998 by Steve Linford to take action against what they allege to be spammers. The correctness of this assessment by Spamhaus is regularly disputed. If the assessment is based on objective characteristics or on standards set by Spamhaus itself is disputed. The name spamhaus, a pseudo-German expression, was coined by Linford to refer to an internet service provider, or other firm, which spams or knowingly provides service to spammers. Spamhaus has been criticized to purposely hide all direct methods of contact from its webpages to avoid transparency, while asking transparency from others.
Disposable email addressing, also known as DEA, dark mail or masked email, refers to an approach that involves using a unique email address for each contact or entity, or using it for a limited number of times or uses. The benefit to the owner is that if anyone compromises the address or utilizes it in connection with email abuse, the address owner can easily cancel it without affecting any of their other contacts.
Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.
Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked. Disposable email address or "masked" email is a different topic, providing a masked email address that is not the user's normal address, which is not disclosed, but forwards mail sent to it to the user's real address.
On Internet usage, an email bomb is a form of net abuse that sends large volumes of email to an address to overflow the mailbox, overwhelm the server where the email address is hosted in a denial-of-service attack or as a smoke screen to distract the attention from important email messages indicating a security breach.
TrashMail is a free disposable e-mail address service created in 2002 by Stephan Ferraro, a computer science student at Epitech Paris which belongs now to Ferraro Ltd. The service provides temporary email addresses that can be abandoned if they start receiving email spam. It mainly forwards emails to a real hidden email address.
Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. Built on free and open-source software and more than seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, users can have their Internet traffic routed via a random path through the network.
Tor Mail was a Tor hidden service that went offline in August 2013 after an FBI raid on Freedom Hosting. The service allowed users to send and receive email anonymously to email addresses inside and outside the Tor network.
The Farmer's Market, formerly Adamflowers, was an online black market for illegal drugs. It was founded by Marc Peter Willems in or before 2006, and moved operations to the dark web in 2010 using the Tor anonymity network. It was closed and several operators and users arrested in April 2012 as a result of Operation Adam Bomb, a two-year investigation led by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).