Everyone wants to be like John C. Dvorak (play along.. I’m going somewhere with this). You know why? Because as his catch phrase goes, he gets no spam. Enterto has an email service that claims to be completely spamless. I’ll be exploring that claim in this paid review post (Enterto found me through ReviewMe).
How it works
My first impression of Enterto’s spamless email offering was pretty much “yeah right.” I mean even almighty Gmail has let a few spams through. As Enterto’s spamless about page says, most people have multiple email accounts – one for trusted business or personal interactions and one used for everything else such as signing up for a sketchy website. (Although I generally use my Gmail account for everything; when signing up for random things I give out my Gmail address with a “+shady” before the @, and I have a filter setup to automatically archive it to my “shady” label.)
Enterto spamless email makes use of unique “channels” for every person you interact with. You might consider channels to be aliases that you can delete whenever you want if you start getting spam through there. For example, let’s say you want to enter a contest to win a Nintendo Wii (sorry, that’s all I think about these days), but the site isn’t exactly trustworthy. Just login to your Enterto account and create a new channel. By doing this, Enterto will give you an alias to sign up with, instead of using your real email address. When the contest is over or you just don’t want that site to be able to contact you, you can delete the channel.
Each free Enterto spamless account comes with unlimited email channels and the ability to “remain 100% anonymous” when you want. When composing an email, you have the option of checking a box to send it anonymously. Unfortunately, it took about one second to peek in the email headers to find my original email address.
Even if someone has found your real email address, there is one more hurdle before they can spam you. When sending an email to an Enterto spamless account for the first time, they will receive an automated email asking them to click a link. That creates a channel so that they can continue to interact with you via email. Too much hassle huh? Yeah, I don’t like it either.
Why it won’t work
The name - Enterto. I’ve never heard of them. I’m not going to trust a service I’ve never heard of – end of story.
Ugly!! – Enterto spamless has a horrid Squirrel Mail interface, only slightly modified with a bit of code to create channels. To make matters worse, it is integrated with their (seemingly shady) search engine service.
Too hard to use – If it took me that long to explain the concept of “channels” to a tech-savvy crowd, I don’t think Enterto spamless will be able to survive with competitors like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Apple’s .Mac Webmail. Is it spamless though? Only in the absolute broadest interpretation of the word. Requiring users to get so involved with managing channels is just asking for a bad review.
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I read the word “Review” in your site’s livebookmark and I thought: “oh no, Paul’s sold out to the man” and after reading the review, I think: “take that, the man!” I wonder if you will still get paid for a negative review?
Spamless? Only in a loophole/lawyer’s definition- channels is just blocking people, per se, yeah?
Heard of them? Have now. ;)
Ugliness? you’re such a mac/web2.0-dude… :P
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Yup, that’s the beauty of ReviewMe – I get paid regardless of negative/positive review outcome.
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Ugh.
The funny thing is — it’s not like spam is a problem any more with Gmail. It just doesn’t go through (unless I’m checking my mail every 3 minutes).
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Yup, I’m very happy with gmail. I go all out with it – tons of filters. I’m using 49% of it as of now.
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I still don’t think I get the ‘channels’. Oh well. I think Gmail is hard to beat… especially with the hosted domain email. I’d certainly go nuts if the 300+ spams I got today were actually in my Inbox.
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To me, Enterto comes across as very similar to the captcha method for blocking comment spam. Making your real users (email senders / comment leavers) jump through hoops in the name of spam protection isn’t a real spam solution at all.
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Well I think that proves we can trust your opinions when you are being paid for reviews.
More to the point, why do new companies keep trying to get into the email/searching field? Leave it to Google and Yahoo and the like… go and find a new service to provide. That said, it’s easier said than done, I’ve spent countless nights in the pub trying to draft the next youtube or flickr on the back of a beermat! This has only ended in me annoying the barman rather than coming up with the next killer idea.
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I personally use http://www.spambox.us …
It’s much more simplistic. You type in your email, how long you want the temporary to last, and it’ll give you a temporary email that’ll forward to your real one, but expires when the time is up.
not a lot out there that could beat gmail or hotmail. I wonder why some compagnies still try to invent the next big thing in emailing… If Google is involved with something there’s not much room for competition left. Sometimes, I feel Google is becoming a little bit like the early years of Microsoft. Am I the only one?
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Paul, what do you mean by 49% of it? I use GMail, and I’m starting to get more and more spam. Kind of bums me out, but what can ya do?
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The only real way to not get spam is have a completely random email address and then give it only to people you trust. And that is why spam will always exist.
@Peter – I meant 49% of the storage space in Gmail.
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Paul, you might want to fix that ReviewMe link you have there, I think you inadvertently put a space after it.
At first you would think – bad for Paul … since you are actually doing reviews of random shady web companies trying to get noticed.
But in fact, it turns out hilarious. It is like slapstick news.
On the other hadn , these companies got a usability test for free … but tha should not be published. I think this is not to do marketing. But it is fun.
Enterto no cierto
Getting paid for this review as well I presume?
Aqua Curve, he said so in the first paragraph.
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Hi
It’s good to hear that you get paid from reviewme for this.Anyway,i dont think there is any concept like spamless.Only way to have spamless is allow people those are in your address book,which is not possible everytime.
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Gotcha. I use about 33% of it my damn self!
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The main problem with Gmail is the lack of available nicks. So many people have signed up for it already (even though it’s only by invite!) that most will find their name is already taken.
Those who have a relatively common name like me will be out of luck, and my site name is taken too. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a cool, unique name like Paul Stamatiou…
One way to alleviate this would be to go the same way as Hotmail and introduce country-code extensions, such as gmail.fr, gmail.co.uk etc…
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Or Peter Filias. :D
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I have had a hotmail email account for years, and I’m getting over 200 spams a day, so I signed up for this Enterto account, so far, I really like it.
You made one statement that, I can’t figure out how you came up with,”it took about one second to peek in the email headers to find my original email address”. Can you tell me how you did that?
Thanks
I signed with enterto in june and using as a research tool (signing up with forums, blogs, dating sites). Works great for me so far.
Today came across this Ugly!! Article. Looks like author has personal vendetta with this company (unsuccessfully working with them in past or some thing I need to know as an enterto user?)
Nope victor, I have no vendetta. I had not even heard of Enterto until recently and I have no affiliation with them. I am just very design oriented and expect quality for web services like these. I also happen to hang out with a lot of web designers so I have become very picky about design issues.
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O, I see. I’m technical oriented, so most important functionality, and also familiar with their technique. 5 years I was using aliases creating manually in my own mail server to subscribe around the internet. Now, problem solved. I forgot about my server, manual scripting and thousands of aliases.
Since june, enterto changed interface 2 times. Search navigation not a big problem – at list they don’t have annoying banners.
I just tried to capture my real email address, but unsuccessful. Getting just – (SquirrelMail authenticated user)
Did you heard about spamarest?
Paul: Is it true to get a question answered, we have to pay now? If so how much is it a case of Ramen?
So this is basically like SpamGourmet, except they charge for it, it requires you to setup the “channels” ahead of time, and you have to use their mail service to get it? Uh, sounds great…
Gmail has proven that you don’t need challenge-response BS to fight spam. I’m actually using a Yahoo mail account now, but only to test the new Beta2 interface. It does seem that the spam protection that the Beta2 users get is better than those who use the regular interface for some reason. Maybe I should just stick with Gmail… Great interface and great spam protection.
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entero suck… don’t even waste you time signing up for that e-mail service, doesn’t work.. tried it for a week i already got spam..
I guess enterto has worked out any bugs and/or complaints from before because I have found it to be simple, user friendly and it works for me just as the claims state it would. I love it!!