A Smart Plan – Why Disposable Email Addresses are So Helpful

There are several reasons why you may want to consider a disposable email address, and the biggest one is that it can eliminate spam, while leaving your good mail untouched.  If you use disposable email to your advantage you may solve many of your email hassles.

When you hand out your email address, you may get spam in return.  As soon as you type in your email address and send it out on the web, you immediately lose control of where it goes and what it will do.  Most likely, nothing horrible will happen, but they will definitely use the address to spam you or they sell it to spammers to make money.

Many web sites require an email address to get you signed up or to allow you access.  Your choices seem to be either never be allowed on any of the good web sites such as online shopping or getting announcements via email, or receive tons of obnoxious spam that clogs your inbox and drives you crazy.

However, if you get a free email account and enter in that address instead of your primary email address, you may just be moving your spam from one email account to another.

Disposable email address services distribute the spam to an unlimited number of disposable email addresses and the spam is eliminated.  They do this by giving you an alias of your real email address.  Every alias is created specifically for a site or mailing list, and the disposable email address becomes associated with it. By default, all aliases of your real email address forward to any mail to that real address, just like if you had used your primary email address to begin with

The source of the spam is easily identified because every disposable email address is only given to one site and associated with it.  It is just as easy to prevent any further spam from that site because the alias that delivered the unsolicited mail is disabled or deleted.  It can no longer accept any messages, and therefore no more spam.

This system works beautifully, except in one place- your web site.  If you have a web site and you wish to have visitors contact you through email, you have to make a real email address available.  If you use a disposable address on your site, it can be disabled as soon as spammers have discovered it.  This may mean that you regularly have to change your email address to prevent the deluge of spam that is headed your way.  An easy way to do this is to use the new address in the “reply to” header.

There are some disposable email address services that allow your to set up a list of senders that are always allowed to send you mail at any disposable email address, called a white list.  The only disadvantage is that spammers may guess such address by chance and then get through with their spam.

Another way to do it is to use aliases that automatically expire.  This way if a new disposable email address appears on the site every day, they all could be set to expire after a week or two.

Either way you choose to do it gives you a relatively simple, but effective weapon against spam.  Spam can almost be completely prevented if you are consistently and exclusively using disposable email addresses on web forums, in forums, on Usenet and in discussion groups, as well as with your contacts on your own web site.

Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to deal with the constant and annoying presence of spam in our already clogged inboxes?  If this is a problem for you, consider getting a disposable email address to help eliminate the headaches and stress of spam and keep your real email inbox free of clutter.