Stop spam through Spamgourmet

 

Spam !

Every internet user today has faced this digital demon. Digital spam mail could be the most common type of unwanted e-mail you get. Even after carefully protecting your e-mail address, you will end up getting spam mail. This is specially a problem because sometimes, you will need to provide your actual email address to a site to avail their services.

Some years back I came to know about and started using Spamgourmet, and till date, it is the best spam filtering system I have used. And I have used quite some. Spamgourmet provides a very easy way of generating free, disposable e-mail addresses. You register with your actual email address, and every e-mail sent to your generated disposable e-mail address will be re-routed to your registered address. The trick here is that you get to control exactly how many e-mails can get through. After the count runs out, no more of any mail received at that address lands in your personal email address. That's all there is. And did I mention the service is 100% free without ads ?

Today I have 140 disposable email addresses generated on the service (just checked), and the service has eaten 3,667 mails from reaching me.

The site itself has  a very simple design, and is very easy to understand. There are two basic modes you can use: The simple no-brainer mode allows you to just generate e-mail addresses.

The advanced mode has more options, you can set the default number of allowed e-mails to be routed, control the remaining counts of any of your addresses, and it even provides a way to reply back through your generated e-mail addresses, so that your mail goes back to the sender !

But the best part of the service is that you need not be on the site to generate a new e-mail address. All you need to do is to register a keyword. After that you can have any email address in the format  :    <something>.keyword@spamgourmet.com

So if I am at an online book store , I just need to sign up with books.keyword@spamgourmet.com

To book a movie ticket, I can use movieabc.keyword@spamgourmet.com

Possibilities endless !

I have used a new e-mail address to register at every new site I tumbled across on the net. 140 addresses ! over 5 years. I would get the first 5 e-mails, ( thats the number I have set), which contains my purchase information, order details, movie tickets..etc.. But after that , I would be bombarded with email adverts, and spamgourmet would happily gobble them all up, keeping my inbox clean.

Note: Some sites, like facebook and twitter, do not allow you to register with spamgourmet addresses. But this is a teeny weeny minority < 1% of the sites I have used.