Disposable Email Addresses: Conceal and Protect Your Online Identity

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Disposable email addresses
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This article overviews disposable email addresses known as dark mail, throwaway, and temporary email accounts. In this article, I’ll explain what they are and how you can use them to avoid spam, simplify your life, or conceal your identity.

What is a Disposable Email Address?

E-mail and social networking communications are core activities on the internet. Unfortunately, email is easy for spammers to abuse. There are several ways to prevent this problem when you sign up for things using your email address online. But only one works if you need to provide an actual working address (to receive a confirmation e-mail, for example), creating the disposable e-mail address.

Most internet service providers and web hosting companies allow you to have several e-mail accounts. The ISP provides an online mechanism for you to create and delete them. Suppose your email provider (Hotmail, Google, Yahoo, etc.) provides the ability to create additional email accounts. In that case, setting up an extra account you do not intend to use for personal communications may be a good idea.

Even if you don’t use an ISP that allows additional accounts, you can still sign up with an e-mail hosting provider. Independent email hosting providers will enable you to create multiple or free accounts on Yahoo!, Hotmail, or other free services. However, some services won’t accept these e-mail addresses for verification purposes).

List of the Best Disposable Email Address Services

Many providers can serve this purpose, but a few are explicitly designed to help you avoid spam and conceal your true identity. Following are a few suggestions that are easy to set up and use:

  • Jetable.org – With Jetable, you can create an account with a specific lifespan, ranging from one hour to one month. The account sent all of the emails to one of your other accounts. You can still review, read, and delete the message. Why do this? Because you don’t have to give out your actual email address. After the specified period, the account is deleted automatically. I’ve done this to get a discount code. However, it is essential to note that Jetable is not an anonymous email service. They don’t modify email headers, and they keep all logs.
  • Mailinator – Mailinator has millions of accounts that are in the public domain, meaning anyone can access and see the emails. You can give out an email address to anything you can think up with the @mailinator.com domain. The service then deletes the emails after a few hours. Use it to avoid spam,

Searching for someone’s email address? Run an online People Search through BeenVerified and search billions of online public records in just a few seconds. Find addresses, phone numbers, associated persons, criminal records, etc.

Avoiding Spam

For example, let’s say that you want to sign up for a free offer on some website, but you would prefer to avoid getting a bunch of spam for privacy reasons. So, you hesitate to use your primary personal email address. In this situation, you could use your secondary disposable email address.

The confirmation request and any subsequent spam will be sent to your disposable e-mail address. You only need to visit the disposable email account mailbox to click on confirmation links or confirm information. This way, you don’t have to worry about the other spam that may come in the future.

Don’t give your disposable email address to friends and family. Also, don’t let your garbage address be associated with your real name or address (that way, an old friend searching for you won’t try to use it to get back in touch, for example). This way, you can be confident that any emails received by this address are useless spam that may be safely deleted.

Discussion Forums

If you participate in discussion forums, you may notice an increase in spam and fraudulent emails you receive. Spammers often gather email addresses from discussion forums using scanning and indexing bots.

Whatever you do, don’t respond to a spam message that provides a link where you can “opt out” of future mailings. All this does is tell a spammer that they have an actual, live working address in use. Respond, and you will likely begin to receive even more spammy and fraudulent messages. Eventually, your Inbox will fill up with spam offers for medicine and people trying to steal your money or get you to download malicious code.

A disposable email address can be a valuable tool to protect the usefulness of your primary email address. For related information, see:

Questions and Comments

Please leave a message below if you have questions about disposable email addresses and throwaway/temporary accounts.

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