Top-tech-tip no.10
How to prevent spam by using a temporary email address.
We’ve all made mistakes when browsing online and there’s one minor footfall that affects us all.
When signing up to a new website it’s easy enough to miss, or misread, the small print. Many websites have a small checkbox that indicates whether you’re happy to receive emails from third parties or, even worse, have your details sold on. What happens after this is not usually malicious per say but you may see the amount of spam or unsolicited emails arriving into your inbox increase.
If the site that you’re signing up for is not one that you’re planning on visiting again then the easiest way around this is to consider using a temporary email address.
There are services available that offer a temporary mailing address that you can use for a limited time before it is then discarded. This means that you can gain access temporarily to a website. This is useful to see if it is worth while signing up with your true identity or so that you are able to access the service they provide for a single time only.
Using a service such as Guerrilla Mail you are allocated a randomly generated email address that can be used for usually around 60 minutes. Signing up for a website using this newly generated e-mail is the same as if you were signing up with your own, just at the point where you’re asked to put in personal details you can omit these instead. Any emails that are sent through to the disposable address to verify the account can still be accessed as long as the user does not navigate away from the inbox page.
It’s worth bearing in mind that this is not appropriate for any website that you do wish to continue using on a regular basis though as once the e-mail address expires you, will no longer have access to any emails sent to it.
Another alternative method for screening emails is to create an alternate identity for your current address. There are many email providers who offer this service such as Google. Using this provider as an example, if your email address is name@gmail.com you are able to use name+XXXX@gmail.com as an alternate email address. In this scenario, XXXX can be replaced by any number of characters or digits. If you’re signing up for a mailing list you may wish to use name+mailinglist@gmail.com – any and all emails that are sent to this address will still arrive in your inbox but, should spam start arriving to this address you can easily set up a filter to stop them instantly by telling the server to place all emails to name+mailinglist@gmail.com into the junk folder. As this is an example for a specific provider I would recommend looking further into the help articles for your own to see if this is a service that they offer.
