Posts Tagged ‘temporary email’

When comparing the many ways to fight spam, creating a temporary email address is by far the best solution.  Gmail, always the innovator, likely has one of the fastest ways to create a disposable email address, but it is likely not the most efficient method for most people.

Let’s say you want to sign up to a website called “SpamCo” but don’t want the spam that is likely to follow.  Well, if your Gmail account is example@gmail.com, simply add a “+” sign to the address, and use this instead: “example+spammerscorp@gmail.com”.  All incoming emails will simply be sent to your original example@gmail.com account.  There is no other step to set up this secondary email address when using Gmail—which makes it practically instantaneous.

Drawbacks…
While the original setup time is minimal, the drawbacks are numerous.  For one, you cannot delete the example+SpamCo@Gmail.com account.  If you do begin recieving spam from Spamco, you must instead create a filter to delete the incoming mail.  For example, you could create a filter that would catch the word “SpamCo” and proceed to automatically forward the mail to a specific folder.  However, the idea of maintaining hundreds of various filters is disconcerting.

Even worse, many websites will not allow a “+” sign when entering an email address, rendering the secondary email “invalid”.

Also, if you can sign up for a website with the “+” sign, you might not be able to confirm your email address as valid.  For example, you sign up for SpamCo using the example+SpamCo@Gmail.com account, SpamCo actually sends the confirmation email to example@Gmail.com, therefore, when you validate the incoming email, SpamCo believes you are emailing from a totally different account, and denies access.

I love the simplicity of setting up secondary Gmail accounts; however, this is probably not the most effective method.  Nevertheless, it’s nice to know it’s there, and it can certainly come in handy from time to time.