Do you have to register to access a website?
Is there a long and tedious form which you don't want to fill out, or do you not want to give them your email address? Here's a few tips for those situations.
BugMeNot
The website www.bugmenot.com allows users to submit and retrieve logins for various websites which require you to sign up. If you go there and type in the address of a website, then BugMeNot will tell you if somone has submitted a working login and password for that site which you can then use, avoiding registration completely. To supplement the web site, there is a Firefox extension to open BugMeNot in a popup window and check the site you're browsing.
If BugMeNot doesn't have a working password for the site, there are some ways you can protect your privacy when registering.
Mailinator
Mailinator gives you a disposable email address for sites which ask for your email so they can activate your account but you don't want to give them your real one, perhaps because you don't want their spam. When you go to the Mailinator site, they generate a random email address for you, eg edwdcxsactlonx@mailinator.com. You can then enter this email into signup pages. When they send you the confirmation email you can login to that mailbox through the Mailinator site to check for activation codes then forget about that email address forever.
Some alternatives to Mailinator are: http://pookmail.com/ and http://www.spamgourmet.com/.
Gmail
Google's free email service, Gmail offers a neat trick which can help you to filter and block spam, when asked to enter your email address to sign up for a site, enter username+sitename@gmail.com where username is your gmail address and sitename is something to recognise the site by. For example if your email address was jim123@gmail.com and you were registering on this site, you could use jim123+vdhri@gmail.com. Then if we sell your address to companies which procceed spam you (we would't though, we're nice!) then you can easily filter the spam as well as identify the source. Note that this trick doesn't always work, as many sites which validate email addresses won't allow you to put a + in your address.
