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The disposable e-mail address: it's often the simple ideas that work best...

In an effort to reduce spam I give my personal e-mail address only to people I feel I can trust not to sell it. Previosuly, whenever a website asked for an e-mail address I gave them one from an old Hotmail account. But soon that account started receiving lots of spam: had the address been guessed, or was it passed on by some unscrupulous individual? Being one address and many websites, it was impossible to point the finger. Yahoo! (with Yahoo! Mail) and BT Yahoo! Mail (in partnership) came up with a solution I have made good use of: the disposable e-mail address. They call it "AddressGuard":

The basic idea is this: you create (up to 500) "aliases" to your real e-mail address, each one of which can be assigned to a particular company or purpose. All of your e-mail arrives in your in-box as normal (or you could set up filters to re-direct it based on the alias). Using the webmail interface you can even use an alias as the "From:" address to send or reply to a message (sadly this doesn't work with your ordinary mail client, unless you manually add an account for each alias). BT Yahoo!'s help pages explain:

Each disposable address has two parts: a base name and a keyword.

Base name: The base name is the same for all your disposable addresses but it's different from your BT Yahoo! Email address. By using this profile, you can
keep spammers from guessing your BT Yahoo! email address.

Keyword: The keyword identifies what you are using the disposable address for. You can use the name of the company to which you are providing the disposable email address, or another word that you will remember.

All disposable email addresses will take the form basename-keyword@yahoo.co.uk Remember that the disposable address is a yahoo.co.uk address. This disguises your btinternet.com address.

Example:

• Your BT Yahoo! email address:
  johnmichaeldelaney@btinternet.com;
• Your base name: dairyman88 (so spammers cannot figure out your real email address);
• Keyword: Widget Designs (based on the store to which you want to give the address);
• Your Disposable Email Address:
  dairyman88-widgets@yahoo.co.uk.

If Widget Designs shares or sells this disposable email address and it begins receiving spam, you can simply shut down dairyman88-widgetdesigns@yahoo.co.uk without affecting your primary BT Yahoo! Mail address or any of your other disposable addresses.

Easy as pie. The ability to stop receiving unsolicited promotional junk at any time is worth its weight in gold. Some companies evidently think just because you've done business with them once, they can act as if you've entered into some kind of long-term relationship and start corresponding—even if you've checked every "opt out" button you can find. Now, "bye bye" really means "bye bye" without getting your mail filters in a twist!

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