Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition

Hack 5: Use Disposable Email Addresses

Level Easy

Platform Web

Cost Free

Much of the junk email you receive is from spammers who bought or scraped your email address from a website where you registered for membership. Most registration-based websites require that you use a legitimate email address; often, you have to retrieve an email from that address’s inbox to complete registration.

If you hate the idea of giving your email address to any website that asks for it and you want to protect your email address from junk mail and spam, use a disposable email address instead.

Web-Based Public Email Addresses

Several services, such as Mailinator (http://mailinator.com) offer free, public, disposable email addresses. Choose any email name at the mailinator.com domain — such as [e-mail] or [e-mail] — and use it to register at a website. Then, visit Mailinator.com to check the public inbox, which doesn’t require a password.

CAUTION Remember, anyone can check the [e-mail] inbox, so make sure nothing too personal winds up there!

Dodgit (http://dodgit.com) offers a service similar to Mailinator, with the capability to check all public email accounts at dodgit.com via RSS.

For more on RSS, see Hack 91, “Subscribe to Websites with RSS.”

Multi-Domain Email Addresses

If you host your email at your own web domain (see more on that in Hack 7, “Future-Proof Your Email Address,” later in this chapter), you have a limitless supply of email names available ...