Fighting spam with burner e-mail accounts
This post will help you improve your Privacy, Security, and Anonymity.
Additional cookie: It will improve your convenience; as we know convenience mostly suffers when we try to improve privacy — not in this case.
Fact: Everyone hates spam, except people who produce it (ok, and dear Koreans who love Spam food :).
WHY?
A lot of spam that we get is from our we register to some e-store, application or we download content like coupons. In many cases, spam is a result of providers selling our e-mails to who-knows-where, or are stolen by hackers attacks.
To avoid spam most of us use an additional e-mail address. If you don’t you should do it.
But here comes the trick. Even spam is of a different kind. Perhaps you like Amazon to send you spam sometimes, but spam from dubious services can be problematic.
There are also some other issues:
- Most service providers sell their data. There is a huge chance that your spam email address will be sold to interested parties (who knows who they are).
- Your spam e-mail will be eventually merged from many sources and it will be easy to build your profile from metadata.
- Sooner or later your spam email will be linked with your real data. And here we go.
- If you have your primary and spam accounts on Gmail, Google knows it’s you. They will surely link your profiles.
Another issue is that if you use the same email/password everywhere you eventually become hackable, and worse, superly hackable if they connect you with your usual email.
The point being: having secondary spam e-mail address these days is not an optimal solution. There are too many trails we are leaving everyday and bad bad marketers learned how to gather and use them.
So the solution for that?
Burner E-mail accounts. (Or disposable e-mail accounts). It’s the same things as burner phones, but for emails.
WARNINGS — before reading further:
- Use this solution for services when you expect to need your email only once.
- DON’T USE this method if you expect you will need e-mail multiple times (say for resetting your password). In this case, your account will be lost.
- USE this method when you need to register for something (and receive something once) and then forget about it. OK?
So how to use burner emails?
I will use Groupon as an example. Not because I think that Groupon is somehow bad, but to show how this works.
1. Head to Temp-mail
Temp-mail will create a new random email address for you. In my case, this e-mail is yekiy29744 (at) netjook.com. Cool.
Copy this address to your Clipboard (or you can even read QR code with your mobile app).
Now open a new Browser window or tab to register an account on Groupon. DON’T CLOSE your temp-mail window.
2. Register Groupon account (or any other service)
So I registered my Groupon account.
3. Receive e-mail
Of course they immediately send an activation email. You can see 2 of them in my temporary Temp-mail.
4. Activate Groupon
Click on the second one ‘Activate Yout Groupon Account’ and then ‘Verify Account’
5. Banzai. You are an owner of a Groupon account.
6. Next steps
As long as you have your Temp-mail window open you can use this address. So you can now order coupon on Groupon.
Once you close your window, your email is lost forever.
USECASES
As said Groupon is just an example. You can use this to create a Reddit account, download pdf from some business site, apply for an event or claim a discount coupon in your local chain coffee shop.
For example, you go to a famous coffee place. They offer a 30% discount coupon but they take your email. Open Temp-mail in your browser, give them a new e-mail, verify when the activation email arrives, show the coupon.
Similarly, you can do it when public wi-fi wants to have your e-mail address.
SUMMARY
This method is super useful to fight spam and keep your spam e-mail healthier (however funny this might sound). Use it when you will need your e-mail address only once.
Temp-mail works great. You can download an application or register for their premium version.
There are quite some good alternatives like https://burnermail.io or https://www.emailondeck.com/ or some other of them.
