Unfortunately, using a disposable or temporary email address doesn’t help when you’re already being spammed in volume. Before I took some corrective measures and blacklisted some domains and addresses, I was getting upwards of 100 pieces of spam every day. My mail provider’s spam filtering was somewhat effective, but some spam still got through while there were quite a few false-positives. I quickly realized that wasn’t the solution.

As an avid listener of the podcast “Security Now!,” I have heard Leo Laporte speak very highly of MailRoute.net. I decided to give it a try and signed up for their 15-day free trial last week. As required by the service, I changed my MX record to point to mailroute.net’s servers. I then turned off my host’s spam filtering. Within minutes, the spam started trailing off and there were no false positives. I’m definitely going to spring for the yearly subscription when the trial ends.

Just today, I noticed one false positive–an email from a client’s backup software–but that was easy to fix. I just selected the message and told MailRoute to “Recover and whitelist sender.” The message appeared in my mailbox instantly.

Check it out.

I could have prevented this incessant barrage by using a disposable or temporary email address. I’ve written about this before (see
Protect Yourself From Spam With Disposable Email Addresses) but I wanted to update you on a couple of other services I discovered.

10-Minute Mail gives you a temporary email address that lasts — you guessed it — 10 minutes. It has a neat feature whereby you can extend the time by an additional 10 minutes in case you didn’t get your download link quickly enough. Geek tested and approved!

Spambox creates a temporary e-mail address for you that will expire in the time you chose, anywhere from 30 minutes to a full year. All the mails directed to this e-mail will be transparently forwarded to your real e-mail. If you’re getting too much email from that address, you can cancel it and stop the flow. If you want to extend the life of the mailbox, you can do that too. This service has a very, very cool feature that allows you use your own domain so that websites who think they are wise to temporary email addresses won’t know the difference. Geek tested and approved!

First, you’ll need a clean email account, either on your email server (if you’re a Geek like me) or with one of the many fine webmail providers. I have several Gmail addresses that are known only to a few people. Now, make it your personal policy to never give the address to anyone you don’t absolutely trust to keep it to themselves. If spammers can’t get your address, there’s little chance they can send you spam. Finally, use disposable email addresses on web pages that force you to provide a valid email address to “register.”

Probably the best known disposable email service is Mailinator. To use it, all you have to is send mail to it. For example, you could use nofoo@mailinator.com. Most services work in this manner. I also like to use spam.la email addresses for throw-away site registrations. All email sent to any_address@spam.la is publicly readable right there on the page. They provide a filter option so you can just look up things you’ve sent there. The other day, someone told me about dispostable.com.

The only drawback to using these is that some sites are wise to the tactic and will complain if you try to enter such an address. In that case, just choose a different one. A search for “disposable email address” will give you plenty to choose from. If you’re diligent in doing this, you may never again see another spam email.