Use Your Email Address, Get Spam
If you hand out your email address, you might get spam back.
As soon as you enter your email address in a form on the Web, you lose control of it. Most probably nothing bad will happen, but they may just as well use the address to spam you, or they hand it to spammers for a few bucks.
Yet many sites require an email address to function properly, or to function at all. It looks like either you are excluded from a good part of the Web (from online shopping for example, and from getting announcements via email) -- or you get spam. A genuine dilemma.
Of course, you could use some free email account instead of your primary email address, but that only moves the problem from one email account to the other.
Get Spam, Throw Away Your Disposable Email Address
Disposable email address services take the idea of the web-based email account a step further. The problem is distributed to an unlimited number of disposable email addresses, and the deluge of spam can be controlled. How is this possible?
When you sign up for something on the Web with a disposable email address, you don't use your real email address but an alias of it. Every alias is created specifically for a site or mailing list, and the disposable email address becomes associated with it.
By default, all aliases of your real email address forward any mail to that real address, just as if you had used your primary email address in the first place.
But as soon as spam tickles in the difference shows. Since every disposable email address is given only to one site and associated with it, the source of spam can be identified easily. Taking proactive measures against any further spam from that site (or the spammers it sold the submitted address to) is just as easy. The alias guilty of delivering unsolicited email is disabled or even deleted. It will no long accept any messages, and no spam.
Fantastic, isn't it? And it really works. But there's one source of spam where even disposable email addresses don't seem to help much: your web site.
