This topic has been covered before in my blog but I tend to take a look at older interesting topics from time to time and update them to reflect the changes that happened to the concept in the time between. One-Use-Emails, also known as Disposable Email Addresses and Throwaway Emails are really helpful when you do not want to give someone your real email address because you fear that they would abuse this information and probably sell the address to make a quick bug.
Many websites, forums and blogs display content only to members, which means users that registered at the website in question using an email address. They send a verification to the email to check that it is valid and the user has to use the information in that verification email to prove that it is indeed his email. This process is time consuming, dangerous for your email address and completely useless.
You may ask yourself why I say it is useless ? Here is why. Users who know computers and the internet already know about one-use-emails and use those to register at those websites.Normal users who do not know about those services register with their real email and tend to see an increase in spam after they registered.
The concept:
The concept of one-use-email services is pretty simple. You are free to choose any email address from their domain that you would like when you register. One service that I like a lot is 6url.com. Valid emails would be ghacks@6url.com, martin@6url.com and everything else that you can come up with. You use this one-use-email to register at the website in question and visit the website of the email service afterwards, for this example it would be 6url.com.
You enter the name of the email that you’ve choosen in the form field, for example ghacks or martin and click check to read all email that was send to that email address in the last days which should include your registration email. Read it, click on the link and you are registered but your normal mail accounts will not see an increase in spam.
Some services give you extra options, you can for instance delete the email which is important because of one security aspect. Everyone is able to read the mails that are send to this account. If you leave the email on the server everyone who reads that email knows that a user with the name xxx registered at a website. It would be easy to go to that website and claim you lost your password. An automatic script sends the password once again and voila, the other guy has your password and can start to abuse your account.
My advice, if you can delete emails, do so.
You should also make sure that at best no one at the website you registered is able to view your email address. If they are able to view it and know the service they might do the same.
Please note that those service do not hide your identity. The website owner and the owner of the disposable email service do know your IP address. This is just a method to avoid spam.
All services are free. I decided that I did not want to post links to services that require you to register or pay money to use their service.
- 6url.com
- dodgeit.com
- dontreg.com
- ipoo.org
- jetable.org
- lortemail.dk
- maileater.com
- mailinator.com
- pookmail.com
- shortmail.net
- spam.la
- spambob.com
- tempemail.net
- tempinbox.com
- xents.com
Firefox Extensions:
Other methods: Email aliases
Google, Yahoo and many other email providers are offering a service commonly called email aliases or email plus. You simply append a +text to your email address; ghacks@gmail.com would become ghacks+text@gmail.com. The advantage of this method is that you can easily filter out everything that comes to ghacks+text@gmail.com. You can also verify which website that you registered to actually sold your email because you see exactly to which +text alias the spam is coming. You could for instance add the sitename to the alias to identify the service at once. ghacks+ebay@gmail.com, ghacks+amazon@gmail.com and so forth.
A disadvantage is probably that it is very easy to analyse this alias and find out the real email, remove the +text part and you have the real email at hand.
Bugmenot:
Bugmenot has a collection of website logins that everyone can use. Instead of registering at a website you search the bugmenot database for a site login, they have logins to popular websites. Maybe you are lucky. This does not work for personalized websites of course. For everything else it is fine.
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4 Responses to “Avoid Spam with One-Use-Emails”
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Get disposable e-mail Firefox plugin
Although I have recently written about 'get one mail' service, I have found a list of places offering disposable e-mails on Ghacks, so check it out if you're in a need of spam honeypot e-mail (forums, websites, blogs…register forms etc.)…
Simply said, make 2 accounts for yourself. First a regular one, second a “spam” account that you check from time to time. The first one use only in a trusted area. And don’t forget to use BugMeNot.com where possible so that you don’t have to create account.
Also, when sumbitting accounts to BugMeNot.com its a good idea to use disposable emails (I use Mailinator)
thank u wey match its great i recomened this tempinbox.com