Paul Tyma is the man
He came up with Mailinator which is conceptually simple yet absolutely brilliant at what it does.
The gist – you go to some random site, they force you to register (sometime later I’ll talk about why I don’t think this is a good idea). Dang, which free email account do I use for spam again. Well never again. You just sign-up with anything@mailinator.com. No pre-registering with Mailinator, no passwords, nothing. Then pop over to mailinator.com, type in your created name – and BAM! – you’ve got that ebook, or software or whatever it is someone decided filling their CRM database with spam was woth doing.
Now some site may block it, like say Facebook but there nifty ways around it. (You would think they learned their lesson with the bugmenot incident)
Oh and he’s running this on a computer in his bedroom. Ok not quite, but it is still a very elegant and light setup.
So I say to you Paul, bravo. If only my college roommate’s late night rantings could be so profound and so technologically efficiently executed. You’ve made the world a better place.