On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:44:06 -0500, in ,
Morgans wrote:

crossposting-snipped

I see you have to register. What will happen to that info? What is the
privacy policy, regarding to selling of, or viewing of, our info by
other people/spambots?

Come on, you're going to let a little thing like registering stop you from
using a site? If you can't figure out a way around something like that
without giving out your actual personal information, you probably
shouldn't be allowed on the net anyway -- or trusted with sharp objects...
grin

OK, I'll walk you through it...

1. Create yourself an alias / fake name.
2. You're using charter.net, so you should be able to create a temporary
email address that you can create a temporary email address for use during
the registration process or you can go somewhere like spambob.com and
create a temporary forwarding address that you can delete afterwards.
3. Go to the site and register with the fake name and temporary email
address. Some sites might send you a comfirmation email that might
contain a link for you to click on -- that's the reason for the temporary
email address.
4. Assuming that you won't need it again, delete the temporary email
address that you created.

So, at the end of this, you have given them a fake name and personal
information, thus no real danger in who they might share it with... You
have also given them an email address that you subsequently deleted, thus
no spam is going to be received by you... All in all, you really haven't
compromised your security, so no reason to worry about it...

Personally, I like to create email addresses with spambob that have
encoded in them what site they are for so that if they sell my email
address to someone and I start getting spam from it, I know who was the
original offending company... You can either do this by actually putting
the original company name in the email address (e.g.
) or perhaps just using a
number (e.g. ) where you index the number in an
external file to the various site(s) in which you use that email
address... I've created some fairly long email addresses (34+
character, not including the spambob.net domain) for various rebates on
purchases and if there is a limit, it's longer than most paper rebate
forms give you to write the email address in...