Get 100% Spam Free, for Free, with Anti-Spam Email Services

Everyone wants to manage and control the spam in their inbox. There are lots of traditional "antispam" solutions out there like spam "blockers" and keyword filters, blacklists and whitelists, but none of them really work. They only grab some of the spam, and they can nab real emails too. They don't work because they leave the decision-making up to software or listmakers, all of which are fallible. With all the online services we use you have to provide emails for everything, but there is no way to know who's going to sell you out and who's not. The old-fashioned approach is migrating from address to address periodically, which has obvious problems, or having separate personal and a "junk" addresses, which doesn't actually solve anything as you still have to sift through the digital garbage in your junk box.

Instead, I prefer to manage my inbox myself with the aid of temporary email addresses and forwarding. If you are somewhat diligent in using these techniques, you can be almost 100% spam free (as if it were pre-spam 1993 again).

The first and simplest way is to use services that provide you a generic temporary address. The difference between this and making free accounts with Hotmail, Google, Yohoo, etc. is that they are incredibly simple to use and are inteded pretty much to be used only a couple times per email you are expecting. Say you want to sign up for worryfreevacations.com, a virtually guaranteed spam machine. Just register with and address from one of the temporary email services and you can sign in. The spam won't come to you, but if you do have to get an email there some time you can always check that inbox. If you never need it again, forget it and never see a single spam.

Advantages:

• Easy to use and very fast to get an email address
• Generate addresses as needed and throw them away when done - nothing to keep track of
• No risk of exposing your real address

Disadvantages:

• Insecure: others can see your mail
• Temporary: don't use for anything you'll need in the future, you might not find the emails
• More tedious than giving out your own real address

These features are pretty much common to all the temporary address services, though there are a few that have great features that maximize the ease of use and minimize the drawbacks. To find the best disposable service, look for these features:

• RSS inbox feed: see the emails that fill up all your disposable addresses as easily as you can glance through your favorite blogs' posts. No needs to delete or manage anything, just read what you want and ignore the rest which will cycle out of view as new messages enter. Plus, never have to revisit the service site again.
• On-the-fly address creation: these services let you make up any address at their domain you want without having to visit the site or set anything up ahead of time. Makes it really easy to make a custom address for every questionable site you register on, plus you can makeup addresses when away form the computer, and they'll be there when you get online.
• OR, Toolbars and extensions: If the sites have RSS feeds and on-the-fly address creation, you can use them efficiently ithouth revisitig the site. If not, a toolbar extension can susbstitute and make them easy to use without loading the service's page. It's pretty much just a way of compensating for failure to have the better features above, but it can make the interface a little more intuitive and user-friendly for the less browser/web savvy.

Several sites offer all these advanced features. As long as you get the key features, most of them have pretty much the same functionality as there is only so much one can do with a web-based temporary mailbox. The main issue after that is how clean and easy their site is. the best sites rely upon their usefulness to get traffic and survive fine with minimal impact ads. If you try a service that plasters the page with links and ads, move on, because the pain of maneuvering through them defeats part of the purpose: simplicity and convenience.

The other technique, a little more sophisticated than disposable inboxes, is a service that provides email forwarding from temporary or limited addresses to your never-disclosed real address. The simplest verison of this just automatically forwards everything to your real address for a period of time and then expires, forwarding nothing more at all. This is pretty similar in function to using the disposable services, that it lasts only for a short time and you might get just a couple spams in that time, but the main difference is that you receive the mails at your regular address and can store, delete, forward, and access with a client just like all you normal mail.

The next level of this service is one that requires a little maintenance, because you make a collection of public addresses to submit to sites and hand out to people and control for how long and from whom the addresses continue to forward to your real email. You might build up a large collection of addresses for different purposes, as many as a unique one per site registration, and for that you do need to return to the sites and login and manipulate some settings. Typically, this is just to deactivate and address that has started delivering a lot of spam. The more sophisticated services will let you do better than just turn an address off, including deciding whose mail will continue to be forwarded and whose will be deleted.

Advantages:

• Secure inboxes -- only you can read the mail
• Use your own inbox and receive forwarded mail the same way as your normal personal mail
• Better control of who can send you mail
• Good for long term use with addresses you might want to routinely make use of

Disadvantages:

• There are a couple that don't, but most all of the forwarding services require registration
• Generally require more maintenance than "disposable" accounts
• Your real address can, in theory, still be spammed if the service is compromised (or unscrupulous)

Same as with the disposable services, not all forwarding services are the same and some have features that make them much better or different than others. What really sets forwarding apart from temp addressing is that, once set up properly, it can be used long term. The services that just forward for a short while are only barely more convenient (if at all) than good timed disposable inboxes, so what I consider important is address management features as well as ease of use. A good service will have the following features:

• Maintain a list of your public addresses which you can manipulate, either by deactivating or limiting their forwarding
• On-the-fly address creation: just like with the disposables, if I have to visit the site first every time I want to get an address, it becomes tedious. Ideally, I should only have to visit the site and login for maintenance.
• Sender filtering: many services either forward everything or nothing. A good one will let you designate senders who can always send mail successfully to an address, while all other mail is discarded.

The good services let you build and maintain a collection of addresses that all forward to your real address, as well as allow flexible on-the-fly address creation, enabling you to build parameters into the address just by how its constructed. By including a domain name in first part of your address (before the @) EmailNot addresses can be immediately set to accept mail only from that domain. Spamgourmet addresses can be set to expire at a time or after delivering a specified number of emails, if you include properly formatted dates and numbers in the address. All of these features let you customize your addresses without visiting the sites and having to perfomr separate manual maintenance.

Another feature is the ability to designate a recipient address each time you make a new address. While this has a greater inconvenience of requiring you to set the recipient each time rather than having a designated sole recipient through you account, it does give you the ability to send mail to other people without exposing their addresses. You can go to the site and make up a fake address and input a friend's real address, and safely submit the fake address to site's on you friend's behalf without compromising his email (and his friendship).

A great additional benefit of all these services is that if you switch primary personal email addresses you don't need to mail your contacts and change registration addresses with all your services: just go to your account at whichever service you use and change the forwarding address, and voilà the old dummy addresses now forward to your shiny new personal address.

Personally, I use a combination of features from several services depending on my needs. I'm still slowly weaning myself off of a handful of old email accounts that receive horrible spam but also the occasional solicited mail from old services I've forgotten about but still want to hear from. My new addresses are almost spam free, and the few that slip in I see are addressed directly to my real address, which means it was I that slipped up and released my true address. A few more months of diligence and converting old addresses to disposable and forwarded ones and I expect to be 100% spam free.

I've tried my best to give a pretty comprehensive list of the known services out there, as well as my frank evaluation of their value and an explanation of my favorites. If I've missed any important services or overlooked important features, please comment and I'll be sure to investigate and update the hub.