If you spend much time on the Internet you’ll notice that everybody wants your email address. The reasons they give for wanting it vary but they’ll generally come down to one of these:
- They use it to identify you — Email addresses are unique by definition and therefore make good user names.
- They want to keep you up to date — In other words they want to send you marketing messages.
- They allow others to contact you — This applies to sites that publish profiles like forums and social networking sites.
- They want to sell it — Bet you didn’t know your address was worth money.
Creating a unique user ID is a legitimate reason for wanting your email address but many organizations think “Heck, as long as we have this huge list of addresses we might as well sell them and make some extra cash.” The same goes for “keeping you up to date”.
Social networking sites are also likely to sell or lease them to outsiders or “Marketing Partners”. Especially if they don’t charge you for their service in the first place. They need to make money one way or another.
This is not to say that everyone wants to sell your email address. Many sites will say up front (some of them truthfully) that your information won’t be sold or otherwise abused. Others will honor their opt-out procedures (if you can find them). That being said, it’s better to err on the side of caution and not give out your permanent addresses to those that have not earned your trust.
Hide Your Email Address
The Wikipedia article on disposable email addresses primarily describes a strategy for using them to isolate contacts. This means using a different one for each contact and provides the benefit of knowing which of your contacts leaked your address to spammers. On the other hand it can be difficult to manage.
For our purposes a disposable email address, also known as a throw-away or temporary email address, is an one that’s used to shield another from spam by not disclosing the shielded address. In some cases it is desirable for the temporary account to forward email to the one that it protects, but not always.
Spam Addresses
Sometimes you just need to hand over an email address in order to gain access to a web site or to benefit from some type of store promotion. Often you can get away with just using a fake one like x@x.com but this has two drawbacks:
- The status of the account may be verified and if it is not active it may be rejected. This is uncommon but since it’s so simple to avoid by using an active email account it makes sense to just get a throw-away address and use it.
- There’s a fair chance you’ll be dooming a real address to receiving a ton of spam. (We’re pretty sure x@x.com has already accepted this fate since it’s widely used as a “null” address. Nevertheless it’s better to be polite and use one that you own.)
For this to work, all you need is an account at Yahoo!, Hotmail or any other free email account provider. The only caveat is that you may have to occasionally log in and check it to make sure the account stays active. On the other hand you can always start a new one if you forget the password or it starts getting rejected.
Temporary Email Addresses
A second frequently used approach to collecting addresses is to require an email address and then send email to it with some sort of key allowing you to collect the benefit you’re exchanging it for. In this case you need to receive email so using a completely fake address is out of the question.
The simplest approach is to use your spam address. Chances are the message you want will be somewhere near the top of the in-box so there might not be too much digging. The biggest problem with this is that you probably don’t know the password for the account.
A better alternative is to use a disposable email address service like Mailinator or Spamgourmet. These services allow you to set up temporary addresses that will deliver email sent to them to your real addresses. These will expire after a certain number of messages or a limited time allowing you to use them once and forget them.
Protect Your Email Address
The bottom line here is that you must be very careful with any email address that you would like to keep spam free. Use the same care you would with your social security number and think before giving out your private and/or business addresses.
Of course, if you have a really, really good spam filter working for you, then all of this extra effort probably won’t be necessary, but some like to have these options available just the same.
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