Create a Throw-Away Email Address

Spam can be annoying and time consuming. In a test, Northeast Netforce investigators “seeded” 175 different locations and monitored the fake addresses over the next six weeks for spam; 100 percent of email addresses used in chat rooms received spam; 86 percent of posts in newsgroups received spam. So what can you do to help reduce it? Bottom line: Don’t use your work address or personal address for open, public forums, where spammers are harvesting your email address. Create a screen name that isn’t associated with your email address or a “dummy” email address. Your ISP can automatically forward the “dummy” address to your “real” address. When spam builds up, delete the decoy. For $9.95 a year, you can get a block of 500 disposable email addresses to use from www.Spamex.com. You can also purchase spam-filtering software for your computer, which “grabs” junk email and files it in a special folder, separate from your real email in the in-box (my favorite is McAfee Spamkiller, www.McAfee.com).

Comments

[Erich]

Better Tip that costs nothing: www.mailinator.com

When you have to Enter an E-Mail Address, take one you want @mailinator.com and check later on if a mail arrived.

Great Service

Greets

Erich

[Yvonne]

I use Yahoo mail for different email addresses.

[Yvonne]

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[Matthew Cornell]

Another vote for mailinator. It supports RSS feeds, so you can check it that way. I use bloglines for RSS feed reading because it's portable, and because it supports multiple generic email accounts - great for signing up for newsletters, etc.

[John Dreom]

How about DisposableE-mail.com?

It's the only one I can remember, when I need a disposable e-mail, lol.