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E-mail is the lifeblood of the Internet. Unfortunately, it
remains far too easy for spammers to abuse the goodwill shown
when people make their e-mail address known publicly. There are
several ways to prevent this problem when you sign up for things
online; but only one works if you need to provide a real,
working address (to be able to receive a confirmation e-mail,
for example), the creation of disposable e-mail addresses.
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Most ISPs allow you to have several e-mail accounts and
provide the mechanism online for you to create and
delete them. Usually, you go to a Member Services page,
log in and then select "E-mail" to administer your
accounts. If you have the ability to create extra e-mail
accounts, you should consider the benefits of creating
one you have no intention of reading.
Even if you don't
use an ISP that allows additional accounts, you can still sign
up with an e-mail hosting provider that allows you to create
multiple accounts or even create free accounts on Yahoo!,
Hotmail or any of the other free services (although some
services won't accept these kinds of e-mail addresses for
verification purposes). |
Here's a good example of what I'm talking about: You want to
sign up for a free offer on some website; but for whatever
reason (typically to avoid
spam or for privacy reasons) you
don't want to give out your main working e-mail address. So
you'd type in your throwaway e-mail address at Yahoo! or
wherever (a provider with webmail access works well, so you
don't have to add the garbage account to your main e-mail
program -- you can just check it right on the web if you need
to) and the confirmation request would go there. Check that
e-mail address and respond to the confirmation, and you're done
with it. As a bonus, you'll not only get what you received, but
you'll also not be bothered by
spam, as it is your garbage
address that has been sold or traded, and not your private,
useful address.
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Don't give out your garbage address to anyone from whom you'd
actually like to receive e-mail, and don't let your garbage
address be associated with your real name or address (that way,
an old friend searching for you on four11.com won't try to use
it to get back in touch, for example). This way, you can be
certain that anything coming to this address is useless
spam
that may be safely deleted.
If you post on Usenet or on web forums, you might be surprised
how quickly and how often your address will be bombarded with
offers of every kind. You can experiment and see that it might
only take a few hours for a
spammer to pick up an address and
try to use it. You can also see who sells what to whom with this
method, and know who really lives up to their privacy policies.
Whatever you do, don't respond to
spam that provides a link
where you can "opt-out" of future mailings. All this does is
tell a spammer that they have a real, live working address that
is in use; and this is the
commodity that spammers trade in -- working e-mail addresses.
Eventually, your throwaway Inbox will fill up with offers for
"herbal Viagra", requests from Nigerian families in need of
someone to retrieve their money for them, fake updates from
Microsoft trying to get you to run malicious trojan-horse
scripts and badly misspelled missives pretending to be from
PayPal or the IRS requesting that you "upd8ate y0ur3 credipt
cahrd informaton". When that happens, you just delete the
account and create a new one.
A throwaway e-mail address can be a valuable tool to protecting
the usability of your real e-mail address. The more
spammers and
scammers waste their own time, the less of yours they burn!
About The Author
Trevor Zion Bauknight is a web designer and writer with over 15
years of experience on the Internet. He specializes in the
creation and maintenance of business and personal identity
online and can be reached at
trevor@cafeid.com . Stop by
http://www.cafeid.com for a free tryout of the revolutionary
SiteBuildingSystem and check out our Flash-based website and
IMAP e-mail hosting solutions, complete with live support.
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