I have mentioned anti spam methods before (eg. http://www.mailexpire.comand more), these are quite simple methods with witch you can create a forwarding email with a limited lifespan, and thus it does not matter if spammers get hold of the email.
One drawback to this method however has been that you actively need to create this antispam email address in advance or when you need it, with mailexpire.com this requires you to create a new account and validate it before it can be used. This in some cases can be an inconvenience as you just need a ‘quick’ address here and now.
Well now there is a new player on the marked, and this service has a few very nice advantages.
The new service is called;
www.spamgourmet.com
What is cool about this service is that once you have setup your account you can create new aliases on the fly without logging in or other time consuming steps. How you ask, well it’s quite easy actually but requires a bit of explaining.
Here is a brief description of the process;
You create an account with www.spamgourmet.com,
to this effect you choose/create your own private alias – as an example we will choose “LUNAR”. Now you have actually done most of the work and can create new aliases on the fly, this is how;
You visit a site that requires your email to download whatnot software, lets say the site is called www.downloadme.com. Now you need to create a new disposable email on the fly, and you can do so simply by making up a new sub email address in this format;
<SOMETHING>.<YOUR ALIAS>@SPAMGOURMET.COM
in our example where the site is www.downloadme.com and our alias is LUNAR this address could be;
downloadme.lunar@spamgourmet.com
Let’s say that later you goto a new site www.uploadme.com and again you need a new disposable email address. This could be;
uploadme.lunar@spamgourmet.com
As you can see is pretty simple to use once it is setup.
What is even more engenius is that the email account you create on the fly will ‘selfdistruct’, it does so by stopping to work after 3 mails have been received (you can via advanced options set it to a different number, but 3 is the default). Thus if: Downloadme.lunar@spamgourmet.com is suddenly spammed you will receive a maximum of 3 emails, quite clever.
Of cause there are advanced settings, here you can change the default number of emails, setup advanced security and add trusted hosts (plus a lot more), some settings can even be set on the fly aswell – you can thus set the number of mails you want to recieve as part of the email (example. upload.10.lunar@spamgourmet.com will allow 10 emails to be recieved, the maximum number is 20)..
The service appear to be fast and forwards mails within 1-2 minutes, although I have experienced a slight delay from a download page – but this could just as easy be caused by the download site and not spamgourmet.com
Alternatives;
There are numerous alternatives as described in a previous post, I have used MailExpire.com quite a number of times – here you can create accounts with a limited lifespan which you can shorten or extend on the fly.
Spamgourmet.com is however as far as I know the only service that offers dynamically created emails.
Well this is actually not true as such, there exists another type of service eg. Dispose-A-Mail www.disposeamail.com (there are many services similar to this) – DisposeAMail however works quite differently from Spamgourmet.com. To use DisposeAMail.com you simply invent an email when ever you need it eg. I-JUST-INVENTED-THIS-MAIL@disposeamail.com and give this to whomever/whatever site requires your email, then you can goto www.disposeamail.com and enter I-JUST-INVENTED-THIS-MAIL@disposeamail.com (or what ever you decided on) in the “Check inbox” and click go.. You can now see whatever mail is received by “I-JUST-INVENTED-THIS-MAIL@disposeamail.com“… One obvious drawback here is, everyone else can do this too – there is absolutely NO SECURITY if people can guess the email address you invented they can check it – so OBVIOUSLY you should never use a DisposeAMail for something that involves password or private/personal data etc.