Jon Fox » Random Ideas

One time use email addresses

jon — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:22:21 +0000

Recently I threw together a tool to simplify my sign up on other services. It’s a script that allows me to use an email address one time, and then ignore all future emails to that address. I often use it for signing up to new services so that I can get the confirmation email, but not get a bunch of spam / bacon I don’t really care about. I set it up with a custom domain so that I can use anything at that domain as an email address. For example, test1@mycustomdomain.com, test2@mycustomdomain.com, and anotherdumbemail@mycustomdomain.com.

The interesting part of it, though, is that the emails all dump to a PHP script. This script looks at the email address it was sent to, and checks a database to see if that email address has been seen before or not. If it hasn’t, it will forward that email to my “real” email address. If it has, it will ignore it.

This has been super helpful when making test accounts on services too as it’s easy to get another email address, but I don’t have to worry about checking a weird email account or getting a bunch of spam afterwards. Just thought I’d mention it in case anyone else out there does a lot of this stuff.

Email Nag

jon — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 01:44:10 +0000

I often keep my emails unread until they need no further action from me. Either they’re responded to, don’t require a response, or they’ve been moved to a todo list of some sort. Unfortunately I have developed a bad habit of leaving emails in this unread limbo a little longer than is reasonable at times. What usually happens to me is I can’t act on the email right at the moment I’m reading it (I need to do something else to respond or I’m on my mobile device and it’s a long response I don’t want to type at the moment) and it ends up going “below the fold” and I never get around to responding to it. Sometimes I’m days or a week or more late getting back on something simply because it fell through the cracks.

This is not a good habit to have and I hate when people are so slow getting back to me, so I decided I wanted to fix it. Which lead me to implement my own Email Nag. It’s simply a script that runs once a day and checks my inbox for any unread emails. If an email is older than some threshold (currently 3 days for me) it will send me a new email w/ the date the other email was received, who it’s from, and the subject line to give me a reminder to take care of the email. If it goes beyond another threshold (currently 1 week) it will send me a text message with the same info.

I’ve been using this for 2 weeks or so and it’s definitely helped me a lot. It’s nice to have a reminder so that I don’t let things drag on too long. If nothing else the daily reminder helps give me an extra boost to take care of the task to keep from getting another nag later. Hopefully this will help me fix the problem going forward.

Smaller Portions at Restaurants

jon — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 07:21:04 +0000

I may be crazy, but I would really love to see more portion options at restaurants. Specifically, I think it’d be really great to see 1/2 or 1/4 size portions available for all entrees on the menu. These could serve two primary purposes:

First, many people don’t want as much food as the default offers. Maybe I’m not that hungry tonight…maybe it’s just the restaurant has huge portions. In either case I think a lot of people would like this option.

The second is for people that can’t decide between multiple dishes or want to have more variety. I’ve definitely had occasions where I’d love to have 2 different entrees and being able to order 2 different 1/2 orders would make a lot of sense to me.

Many other industries are moving to more personalization and more options. I really think this relatively minor change could have a significant impact on the restaurant business. Who wouldn’t love the ability to better customize their portions or mix and match food?