Many of us subscribe to new web sites almost on a daily basis. On each subscription we are usually required to provide our email address in order to get our account activated. The thing is that our email address is a precious asset and thus we better keep it out the hands of spammers. From my experience, i end up using regularly around 5-10% of the web sites i subscribe to. Some of the web sites i subscribed to but don’t use, turned to be unfriendly SPAMmers, resulting in productivity loss and other annoyances. Sort of Catch 22, isn’t it?

An applicable solution is to provide web sites we subscribe to with a temporary email address that will allow us to subscribe and evaluate the web site, but will prevent them to SPAM us in case we are not interested in their services.

There are several services that i found useful and thus i recommend you to add them to your Antispam toolbox:

1. MailExpire.com: provides a temporary email address available for a period of time starting from 12 hours to 3 months. Anything sent to that account is forwarded to your real email address.

2. GetOneMail.com: here’s the concept is a bit different. It provides you with a dispensable one-time email address that you can use for an ad hoc subscription to a web site.

3. Mailinator: provides you with a read only (and non secure) dispensable mail address that you can use when interacting with web sites that might potentially spam you.