Reduce Spam by using alternative Google Mail Address?

I read about this tip yesterday on the Digital Inspiration and found it quite interesting. The tip mainly states that users who sign up for Gmail don't get one but two mail addresses: [email protected] and [email protected]. The suggestion was to give one out to friends and use the other for all the other signups and conversations on the Internet.

It might seem like a solid trick unless you think about it for a second. If you know that there are two email addresses on those two Google domains that lead to the same user, the spammer could know as well and most likely will.

So, even though you use one email for private matters and the other for everything else, Mr. Spammer will simply add a script that sends mails to both Google accounts automatically.

The only real way that works in my opinion are separate email accounts with no connection whatsoever. Using one account with those two email addresses will simply not reduce the amount of spam that you receive.

Update: While it is still possible to use either email address when you sign up on the Internet, you may have noticed that sending always uses the gmail.com email address. You need to keep that in mind if you sign up for a service that you need to reply to, or when you contact the service by email.

An alternative are email aliases which you can make use of as well. This is done by appending +name to the user name of the email address. If your email address is [email protected], you can use any [email protected] combination. Emails will still arrive at the [email protected] address. The method still has its issues, as spammers can simply derive the original email address from that as well (by removing the+alias part from the email address that you have used.

So, it is definitely best to use separate email accounts that have no connection to each other, as spammers won't be able to draw a connection between the two this way.