If you are sick of getting spam after joining up for an online forum, buying something with PayPal or registering some software? You can combat spam by using disposable email addresses.
Imagine that for every separate "thing" you sign up for you have a different email address. That means that for every piece of spam you receive you can identify, from the email address, who is spamming you and potentially block it. Or in the very least you can tell which mailing list got hacked (I get spam to my uniquely Adobe address, because Adobe was hacked a few years ago). There are several ways of obtaining disposable email addresses. gmail disposable addresses If you have a gmail account, it's really simple. Say your gmail address is [email protected]. It just so happens if you add a plus sign and something after it, like this: thatsme+dodgy_website_170518@gmail.com gmail will ignore everything between the + and the @. The +dodgy_website_170518 bit is unique to that signup or whatever. I typically copy/past the domain name from my browser address bar. The numbers are the date I create it. Now, if I start receiving spam to that address I can:
Disposable address services I also use a service called spamgourmet. The user interface is rough as guts, but it has useful options, including instant creation. Spamgourmet will forward the first 20 emails to a given address, then block. You can add an address or domain to a trusted list before the initial 20 run out, or extend the count-down. There are many other disposable address services. Reduce the amount of typing I hate typing more than I have to. So I use a utility called KeyText. It lets you set up hotkeys that will generate a predetermined text string as if it came from the keyboard. So I have hotkeys for my gmail and spamgourmet base addresses, plus things like my name, scandinavian letters ø ö æ å ä ü (I correspond a bit to relatives in Norway and Sweden) and a couple of special symbols ° and µ.
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