Preventing Spam with Unique Disposable E-Mail Services

I really don't need to talk about the current situation with spam on the Internet. I have 10+ mailboxes, all of them receiving at least 50 spam e-mails per day, but I still try very hard not to share my personal address with anyone. Sure, from time to time your buddy will send you a funny picture with your address with 100 others in the CC field, but my main problem was preventing my address to share via services I subscribe to.

Subscribing to mailing lists, newsletters and registering for webcasts would eventually turn my e-mail address in something of a "public domain". Although I try to check out privacy policies and unsubscribe mechanisms, in 90% of the cases e-mail address that was private before the subscription would start getting unsolicited e-mails within a week or two.

The Internet is a great place, there are thousands of people with the same problem, so there are a lot of good solutions and all of them are based on the disposable e-mail addressing concept.

Disposable e-mail addressing refers to an alternative way of sharing and managing e-mail addressing. It aims to set up a new, unique e-mail address for every contact or entity, making a point-to-point connection between the sender and the recipient.

Here are some of the services I am using. They are all based on disposable e-mail addressing, but each of them has its own unique twist on it.


Jetable - www.jetable.org

Jetable is french word for disposable. The service, provided by APINC (Association for a Non-Commercial Internet) was started in mid 2003. It is clearly stated that this is not an anonymous email service and therefor email headers are not modified and logs of the service are kept. Just to note that the same situation is basically with all similar services.

I liked the service because it was extremely easy to setup. Punch in your real address, select the "expiry" time and hit submit.

The address you will get will look like ekldusp08s7v0eij@jetable.org. In the past couple of months I came across a couple of situations where the e-mail was actually not forwarded to my real account. This just happened when I used GMail as the "real" mailbox.

There is also a Firefox extension for Jetable (available from the service homepage), but it was developed almost 2 years ago. Recently there was a post for a workaround if you would like to run the same extension on Firefox 2.0+.

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