If you give your e-mail address to anyone on the Internet, there is a good chance to be included in a one, or many spam lists, and to become a subject of multiple spam emails. There are descent filters in most of the Web-Based servers or POP3 email clients. However, it is a good idea to prevent your address to be even a subject for an email abuse. One of the easiest ways to prevent your email to get to the “wrong” people and minimise the amount of spam is to use a disposable e-mail address. The basic idea is this: obtain and use an e-mail address other than one of your main e-mail address or addresses, doing certain on-line business registrations or transactions. Some of the situation, when disposable address might get handy:

  • Signing for online Web Sites or informational services.
  • Shopping online.
  • Entering contests or sweepstakes.
  • Signing for forums, message boards, or social networking sites.
  • Seeking for one-time information on any products or services.
  • Posting messages to newsgroups.

If you participate in on-line activity that fits the above categories and any similar others, you may find that weeks and months later you may receive a massive amount of the unsolicited commercial email from sources you have never contacted in the past. This is possibly because the companies involved have “shared” your email address with other Internet-based businesses, and this sharing can continue with other companies indefinitely. Another way your e-mail address can be distributed is when less secure companies get “hacked”, and have their customer information stolen. Also when going out of business, firms sell their assets, and e-mail addresses may be considered to be assets.

An increasingly popular and very effective way to avoid the spam flooding is to using disposable e-mail address (DEA) services. The idea is simple. When, for example, an online merchant asks for your e-mail address, you just use the service to generate a disposable one. You can read the incoming email online, or the service forwards e-mail sent to this address to your real e-mail account. If the disposable address gets spammed, you can simply close it. In addition, you can use multiple addresses for statistical and strategy generation purposes, as you are able to keep track of which account were submitted to which service, also pointing out on the main spam-generated source. When spam to that disposable address increases to an undesirable level, you can terminate that disposable address and create a new one.

There are multiple complimentary and commercial service providers that offer disposable email addresses to the users, which are slightly different in terms of the technical approach, list of services provided, and life span of the disposable email on the server (at some providers, it can be unlimited). For your convenience, I have generated a Rating List of the top 40 free services, providing disposable addresses to the users. Brief description, rating, and links for the sites access are included:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-24864-free-disposable-email-address-providers.aspx

If you are on Gmail you can also create a disposable email address. Let’s say that my email address is varindersingh@gmail.com (which it isn’t) - you can easily transform this email address to:

varinder.singh@gmail.com

varin.der.si.ngh@gmail.com

varindersingh+hello@gmail.com

var.indersingh+yabba@gmail.com

As you can see, Gmail allows you to generate various combinations of your existing email address all of which are valid.

If one day varin.der.si.ngh@gmail.com starts getting spammed you could easily block off the email address by creating a filter.

Firstly click ‘create a filter‘:

Then enter the email address that is being spammed:

Hit next and tick the ‘delete it‘ tickbox.

Click ‘create filter‘ and you’re done!