The Anonomi site allows you to create an account in any name of your choosing and link it to an email account under your control.  All you need to do is promote the address anonomi.com/ITWire (for instance) and respondents will be taken to a web page where they can create a message which will be sent to your nominated email address.  A CAPTCHA entry ensures (hopefully) that robots can't game the system.

This has a couple of advantages.  Firstly, spammers have great difficulty in targeting you as your email address is fully anonomised.  Secondly, anyone who wishes to engage in an email conversation is unable to know your true email address until you choose to respond.  Obviously, from that point on, any interaction is between known addresses.

This is essentially the story told by the anonomi website, however there are a bunch of more interesting uses.

For small business, there is a wonderful opportunity to create targeted interface forms, all of which can be delivered to a single email address.  To confirm this, I easily created anonomi addresses for all the ITWire writers, all connected to a single 'real' address.

Guys, if you want your address, let me know!

For big business, a similar story – campaign-targeted response addresses allow separation of responses.

For we journalists, the ability to encourage feedback without exposing an (possibly private) email address is very useful.

Finally, what, I hear you ask, is the "dark Google?”  Heap had the interesting idea that by replacing the white background normally seen with all Google searches with a black background, energy consumption would be reduced.  The 'green' alternative!  Unfortunately, too many studies confirmed the pointlessness of this argument.

Any feedback, contact me: anonomi.com/ITWire