DMA – Disposable email addresses in your subscriber lists
By: DMA
Disposable email addresses, sometimes referred to as anti-spam addresses, are email addresses that people use for a period of time and then disappear causing emails sent to that address to either bounce or get automatically filtered to the trash. No email address lasts forever but these types of addresses can have very short life spans. They can be categorised into two types. Those that exist permanently until the recipient removes them, which we will call semi-disposable, and those that exist for a short pre-defined period of time or for a set number of messages before disappearing. A semi-disposable email address is in effect an email alias. For example I have the email address shill@ but also the alias sh@. At any time I can remove the alias sh@ and the emails will start to bounce without it affecting my main email address. Many disposable email addresses are unrelated in any way to your main email address as they use a third-party email service and forward replies to your main account until the address expires.
Disposable email address services
Most ISP’s will allow you to create semi-disposable email addresses. Yahoo! Mail call the service AddressGuard. Gmail and Hotmail allow you to set up alias addresses so the new address gets delivered as normal to your main account.
Some ISP’s including Gmail and Hotmail also allow you to append a tag to your email address to create a new address. For example, if your address is simon@example.com, then you could also use simon+newsletters@example.com or simon+friends@example.com and they would both get delivered to your inbox. You can have any text after the “+” symbol to create an infinite number of possible email addresses.
The downside of using a tag to create a disposable address is that there is no way to remove the address should it start to get spammed. It will always be valid and if you no longer want to receive anything from the address you will need to setup filters to send it to your trash. The advantage of an alias is that they can easily be deleted and the address becomes invalid and will then bounce.
If you want to create true disposable email addresses then there are many free services available such as SpamGourmet, TrashMail or Guerrilamail. Some give you the option of setting the number of messages your temporary address will receive before consuming or bouncing messages, others allow you to set a life span for the address. Some give you the option to do both.
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