Disposable Email Accounts: The Anti-Spam Decoy

We all have experienced the typical sign-up process that many websites put us through to let us access premium content, or just to use the services offered. The thing is that they ask you for an email confirmation and then blast your inbox nonstop with tons of undesired messages and SPAM. It is annoying and time-consuming to open your email from your computer or smartphone at home or the office just to find yourself lost in a junk mail disaster. Disposable email accounts are the perfect way to reduce some of the heat caused by being an active internet surfer.

It has been said that spam mail is a big work disruptor. Here is an infographic that gives great stats on spam. What we can see is that at least 66% of businesses are disrupted by spam every year, this academic article says that 88% of all email traffic is spam or has irrelevant content.

Irrelevant content can take a lot of time to clear for us. It takes us an average of 3 minutes a day to skim through every email and decide whether it is spam or not, and close to 8 minutes a week looking for those messages that were put on the spam tray by mistake.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. I mean, there is something we should be able to do to at least reduce the amount of spam that is sent our way, right? What if I told you that, fortunately, there is a dedicated community of websites that offers a simple solution for this and other problems, and most of them just require a couple of clicks? Keep reading and find out how to reduce the spam targeted at you.

Disposable eMail Accounts. How Do They Work?

While they may hold some minor differences between them, the main trick is to generate a disposable email address and keep it online for a fixed period, or at least long enough to perform a standard email verification process. Then, the temporary email account ceases to exist, and that’s it!

There are several ways to establish the account name; some sites will generate a login name automatically, while others will give you the chance to create it yourself. Whichever the case, make sure that your login name is not too common and uses lots of random numbers and letters, thus increasing your chances of successful email confirmations.

Advantages For Users

Temporary email address services establish a unique and different email address for a given sender/recipient combination. This gives you an edge against those people that sell email lists to spammers and other dishonest internet users that lurk on discussion websites and chat services. They also work for online stores, cloud storage services, and other sites that require registration with an email confirmation as a requisite, when you do not want to receive any more information from them in the future. Because spam and personal data theft both have become daily threats, disposable email services are a handy tool for defending yourself in the ever-changing internet environment.

Some providers let you manage your disposable email accounts from your real email´s dashboard. The plus side is that the websites that record your temporary email address will never find their way into your personal inbox. If used correctly, you can find out if a receptor uses your email information in a dishonest way before giving away your real data. Additionally, they are an excellent way to spot phishing attempts.

The Benefits of the Internet Itself

Disposable email accounts have a positive effect on the web community. More and more website admins and marketers are getting higher bounce email rates when they try to reach their customers, and they started to realize why. For good or ill, email marketers are detecting an increase in the use of disposable email addresses to avoid undesired messages, and this has forced them to adapt by changing their standard practices.

To be fair, online marketers are starting to improve the overall design of their websites and sign-up mechanisms. The consensus among service providers is that the best way to circumvent the issue of hard bounces is to understand their users and to be reasonable. People use disposable email services because they don’t want to receive spam. It is that simple. If they use them in a given website is because they consider it to be not worthy enough of their trust.

Disposable email accounts, and their effects, have changed the way marketers target their customers. They are now making a great effort to inspire confidence by offering a moderate and reasonable emailing policy in order to reduce their bounce rates. They are also giving detailed information about what they will send to you and how often, so you can feel safe and provide your real email and data. So there is yet another good reason to use these spam decoys whenever you see a website is not being clear about its email policies.

Get started!

Here, we will name some of the temporary email services we have tested with good results. They all have different approaches and conditions so you can choose the one you feel covers your specific needs. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, and it is not sorted in a specific order.

• GuerrillaMail

This efficient service holds your unchecked messages for one hour and checked messages for two hours and can send emails with sizes up to 150 Mb. You can choose a randomly generated name or create your own and can create an “alias” for your email address.

• Mailcatch

The duration of your temporary email varies from a few hours to a few days depending on server use. It allows you to choose a login name of 1 to 25 characters long (remember never to use common names). Includes a nice-looking Firefox add-on.

• 10minutemail

A blazingly fast service, 10minute mail generates a random mail for you that will disappear after 10 minutes! You can click a special button to expand its lifetime for 10 more minutes if necessary. It allows you to reply to messages and has multilingual support (over 40 languages).

• Mytrashmail

On this site, your disposable email addresses are removed after a maximum period of 3 days, depending on the volume of messages received. The smaller the amount of incoming mail, the longer it remains active. You can choose your login name; it is password protected, and it allows management from your real email account.

• Mailinator

Here, your email will last five days. It can store ten messages at once (when the 11th arrives, the 1st will be deleted) and doesn’t support attachments. You can choose the name, and they give you some suggestions (we recommend picking one of those). You can use it from traditional email clients like Outlook.

Disposable email accounts will not provide a spam-free life for you, but will at least act as an effective decoy against spammers or irrelevant mailers.

Feel free to give them a try and let us know how they worked for you in the comments section!