Disposable Email Addresses
In this automated world known as the Internet, it gets to the point where you putting your email address everywhere to get information, have your say, login to sites, post to forums, etc. With your email addresses exposed that often, you will notice that your spam count increases and never seems to go away. Even Microsoft says that around 97% of all email is spam. But we just have to login or get that information. What should you do?
Disposable email. What is that you may ask? Exactly what the name says. Throw away addresses. These are addresses you put in to setup a web account somewhere, get the confirmation email, and then go about your day. No harm no foul.
Are these easy to use? In a word yes. There are many out there, but I will look at 4 of these: Mailinator, Guerrilla Mail, Spamgourmet, and Sneakemail. As always these are always free to use.
Mailinator:
The first thing that comes to mind when you open the page is how busy the page looks, and there is nowhere to login. The only area to enter any information is Check your inbox. Wow. What is my mailbox? After going through the FAQ it is easy to figure out. Your mailbox is whatever you put in that field. What about a password you are now wondering? None required. Now I know you want to know about how secure this is, it’s not. Do not have any confidential emails sent here. So how does it work then? When you are filling the form, you will pick whatever email address you want “insertemailaddresshere”@ on of the following domains: mailinator2.com, sogetthis.com, mailin8r.com, mailinator.net,spamherelots.com, or thisisnotmyrealemail.com. After filling the form you go back to mailinator and put in the inbox you chose “insertemailaddresshere” and hit go. All email will be deleted in a few hours, so you will need to go and confirm shortly.
Guerrillamail:
Now I have moved on to Guerrillamail and am struck by the contrast between Mailinator and Guerrillamail. Where as Mailinator is very cluttered, Guerrillamail is sparse. You are given the option of generating a random name or inputting your own. Again there is no password, so if someone knows it, they can see the traffic. After you have picked your name, you are taken to a second page which actually shows any pending email with a countdown time until the account expires. There is the option to extend for another hour if needed. I do like that it has an rss feed of your email so you don’t have to sit there and continuously hit reload to check for more email.
Spam Gourmet:
At Spam Gourmet you actually have to do more then just pick a name. You do create an account with this service, including confirming your current email address. This is done because Spam Gourmet is a mail forwarder. What do I mean by that? Well, you will create disposable email addresses to give out, and when the email comes in, it will be forwarded to your current email address. How is the protecting you from spam? When you are on a site and needing to enter an email address, you will put in whateveryouwant.x.user@spamgourmet.com. We will break this down. whateveryouwant – is pretty self explanitory, x – how many emails you want to receive before the address self distructs, user – your Spam Gourmet userid. You can even use this formula websitename.user@spamgourmet.com. This will help you determine what site the email is coming from. That account is good for three emails.
Sneak Email:
Lastly we get to Sneak Email. Like Spam Gourmet, Sneak Email is an account based forwarding site. This site even includes a bookmarklet that will allow you to open and generate a new email address while visiting the site. Once you do create you account and login, it does provide you with a lot of options, folders to send messages to, labels, rules. With all of these settings (the help links do truly explain what each option does) you can chose if you want the mail to bounce back not reachable or so on. What the service does that others do not is they allow you to continue to use this email address until you choose not to anymore. So if you do sign up for a website or email list or what have you, you can continue to use this email address until you decide you are done with it.
I hope this information is helpful to you all. If you know of others, or have experience with these. Please let me know.
Diego is currently an IT Engineer that is trying to bring the same knowledge his users get to the web. He also maintains Your Home PC Helpdesk Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/security-articles/disposable-email-addresses-991940.html