Disposable Email at Your Service
by Diane S. Kendall
Consider this scenario. You are in charge of the prizes at the school carnival, which you buy online. They ask you for your email address - a simple request, but do you really want to get emails about deals on squeaking rubber hammers, water weenies, sour candies and other related doo-dads for the rest of the life of your emailbox? Probably not, but what can you do?
Here's another situation. For a school project, your daughter is asked to track down and contact an expert on Mayan architecture for a report she is doing. The teacher has suggested some names, but since you don't know this person, do you really want your 13 year-old giving out her real email address? Again, probably not.
One increasingly popular and effective way to duck this kind of spam or avoid this kind of situation with your children is to use a disposable email address (DEA) service. This is how it works. You use one of the services to generate an email address to give to a merchant like the carnival toy company or the Mayan expert. The service then forwards any email sent to this address to your real email account. If the disposable address gets spammed, you can simply close it. And think about this: if you use multiple addresses and keep tabs on which one you gave to whom, you'll be able to ferret out who to blame if you start receiving spam at any one of your addresses.
While you may get some help from the disposable address services on helping you associate addresses with the accounts on which you've used them, you still have to be careful. Remember if you get a message on a disposable account and you reply to it (remind your children of this ,too), you will probably end up revealing your real address in the From: field.
Here are a couple of services you might consider trying:
Emailias ($19.95 per year) is ideal for any Web shopper. It adds its own button to your Internet Explorer menu bar for creating a new disposable address to send in when you make your purchase. It also points that new address to deposit any messages it receives in one of your real email addresses and remembers the Web site for which you created the disposable address. A pretty neat trick, eh? You can also set addresses to expire at a given time and date and your real address is kept secure because it isn't part of the DEA that you create. When you get spam on which you were blind or back copied (BCC), Emailias helps you determine which disposable mail address received it by adding a header with the address listed. One note: Emailias doesn't do blocking of known spammers such is done by some of the other services. They do give you unlimited addresses and the maximum size of messages passing through the service can be up to 50 MB.
Spamex ($9.95) is even more reasonably priced and also allows you 500 addresses. The only drawback is message size which is 500K, but big enough for most everyday communications. You can create custom addresses or they will be self-generated and automatically associated with a Web site - a must for Web shoppers. Addresses are set to expire after a specified number of messages have been received or a specific time period has lapsed.
Mailshell ($35 per year) is the cyber-supremo of DEA services. Mailshell can apply its spam filtering to any existing ISP (Internet Service Provider) or Web mail service. You can read your mail through Mailshell's Web site or in your regular mail service. You also get an unlimited number of disposable addresses. The base price gives you a domain like @dianekendall.mailshell.com and for $16.95 per month more, you can eliminate the mailshell from the domain name. Like the other services, addresses can be set to expire after a set amount of time. Messages can also be of unlimited size.
SpamGourmet (free) has a great price but has some limitations including the number of messages each address will be able to accept. There are two modes - No-brainer and Advanced. In the first you get a user name and then you give out self-destructing addresses in the form of whoever.n.username@spamgourmet.com. Whoever is some word or name you choose and n is the number of messages you can receive at that address until it self-destructs and returns error messages. So if you used the address dsk.7.kendall@spamgourmet.com you could receive seven messages before it would send out error messages. The problem is that anyone could pose as you and send messages using your account name. In Advanced mode you can also add trusted senders - people who can send messages without being counted in the maximum message count for that address. My question is though, if they are trusted senders, why wouldn't you give them your real email address to begin with? The problem with this site is if it starts being used more widely it won't take long for the spamsters to figure out its limits.
The only way to find out if DEA services will help eliminate spam in your mailbox is to give one a try. None of these services are that expensive and they can help you save hours of time.
Service Information
Emailias
Emailias L.L.C.
http://www.emailias.com
Spamex
ClicVU Inc.
http://www.spamex.com
Mailshell
Mailshell.Co Inc.
http://www.mailshell.com
SpamGourmet
SpamGourmet
http://www.spamgourmet.com
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