No doubt, one of the biggest threats on the Internet is spam. While webmasters are hit most by this factor, day-to-day internet users face this problem as well in the form of email spam. Having your mailbox eventually being bombarded with spam mails daily is virtually inevitable but preventive measures can be made using different techniques and one such technique is by using Email Redirection services.
Email redirection (or forwarding) as the name suggest typically means to forward incoming emails to one email address to another. In this case we use temporary email addresses which forward emails to another account and expire after a specific period of time. This way, if you suspect an online service you wish to sign up for to sell your email address, you can use a redirection service to forward mails for a short period of time (for example, 24 hours) upon signing up and once the temporary mail expires, you don’t need to worry about being spammed from that website or the service your email is sold to.
The problem lies in knowing which online services are ‘resellers’ of your email address and which are not. To be on the safe side, it would be advisable to use redirection (or disposable emails) for any service that you signing up as a ‘one time’ visit, for example to download a free ebook. It would also be advisable to use such email addresses with a long expiration date (as some services require you to verify email change using your existing email address)Â if you plan on being an active member of a service but not convinced how honest their policies are, once you are know that your email is guaranteed safe, you can edit your account preferences to your primary email.
Services
There are plenty of free email redirection services, web based and in the form of browser addons that let you create temporary disposable emails that redirect to your mailbox and expire after a period of time.
Tempomail
I personally use the Tempomail Addon for Firefox (yet another reason to use firefox), which is a very easy to use addon that quickly and easily creates temporary emails. Once the addon is installed, the tempomail entry is integrated into your firefox textbox context menu, all you have to do is right click a text box, select ‘Tempomail’, specify your email and expiration time and select ok. A random disposable email would be generated and inseted into that textbox and you are done.
While the addon is great their web based version is in French (of course Google can translate it for you) and not as user friendly as their addon, so here are a few more recommended services:
Trashmail
Trashmail too has a similar firefox addon and an english user-friendly web based version as well. So if you are an IE, Opera or Safari user you can use the web based version of Trashmail which is just as easy to use as the addon.
For some reason though, emails did not redirect properly with Trashmail which is what made me to switch to Tempomail, however the addon has a good rating and their website is pretty decent too so you might want to give Trashmail a shot too.
Temporary Inbox
Temporary inbox is another similar redirection service and with the Firefox addon as well, good news for Opera and IE users, they have an IE toolbar and Opera widget as well. Temporary Inbox functions differently though, here emails are not redirected, instead a temporary mailbox is created which can be accessed from their website by typing the temporary email you used. These ‘inboxes’ are deleted after six hours.
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Good advice. Gmail also is incredibly good at eliminating Spam. I average less than 1 spam message in 3 months on Gmail.
Lindsay @ Addiction Rehab Blog’s last blog post..The Discovering Alcoholic
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Gmail does not completely prevent the spam entering your mailbox however spam mails are efficiently filtered to the spam folder, you barely get any spam as your email is still not exposed to spammers. Using disposable emails and other preventive measures hopefully it should stay that way.
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You say a temporary forward but what if you need something more long term. One of my eccommerce sites gets tons of junk on many accounts. These addresses have never been gave out and yet somehow they were still phished out and spammed. I have been slowly cranking up my spam filter but I do not want to miss one from a potential customer.
Tracy’s last blog post..Massage Chair Holiday Shipping Deadlines
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I think if you email address has already been exploited by spammers, you’ll have to look at filtering options, since if you are not giving it away using disposable email addresses wouldn’t be the answer. Is your email handled by gmail? if not i suggest you switch to gmail as its spam filter is very efficient, infact i could say it’s nearly perfect.
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Nice work man..keep it up.
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