Sat - October 25, 2003

Dubbed AddressGuard, the service allows registered users to create disposable email addresses to use on commercial sites. Mail sent to these temporary IDs is delivered directly to special folders in a user's inbox, where they may be reviewed or automatically discarded.

Here's how AddressGuard works:

Let's say that your Yahoo! Mail address is BillyBob@yahoo.com and that you want to purchase the collected works of Willie Nelson from RandomMusicSite.com. Instead of providing the site with your primary email address and risking that it will be sold or licensed to third parties, you could use AddressGuard to create a new disposable email address, such as Spam-RandomMusicSite@yahoo.com, for the site instead. When unsolicited email starts to arrive at that address, you could delete the spam or delete the disposable mailbox itself.

In my example, I included the name of the commercial site in the disposable email address used for that site. Yahoo doesn't require this, but doing so provides a great way to track how and where third parties get your email address, and how they're using it.

If you don't have Yahoo! Mail, don't despair. Most ISPs allow you to create a limited number of free subaccounts for your email account to accommodate families with several internet users. You can use these subaccounts to fight spam by creating a special subaccount—say, bellfamilyspam— that everyone in the family agrees to provide to commercial sites. You'll then know that any email sent to that subaccount is commercial in nature and quite possibly unsolicited. Treat it accordingly!