Tim Barcz

Protect your inbox, very cool idea

Email addresses to me are like shoes.  When I buy a pair of shoes I buy them to be my running shoes.  Running shoes are the top of the pyramid for me.  After the shoes have hit their life expectancy as running shoes they get replaced by a new pair of running shoes.  The original pair is then demoted down to my everyday shoes.  Shoes that I wear to work, to the grocery store, ect.  After that they get demoted to the shoes I do yard work in.  The last and final stage of a pair of shoes, what's left of them, is to be my disc golfing shoes, where they're likely to get wet in rivers and ponds.

I use email addresses are much the same.  I get a new email address and I protect it from the hoards of spam out there.  I don't just give out the new email address willy-nilly.  I try to protect it using an older email address as a buffer.  When required to give an email, I provide my spam email address (some old hotmail account) which I can access to answer confirmation emails if need be.  Over time though I enter my email into what I think is a trusted site where I will be receiving email notifications regularly, so I give them my primary email address.  Eventually I get overloaded with spam and give up on that email address and create a new account somewhere on some great new mail service.  The once pristine email address I used to own gets demoted, just like my shoes, to the role of spam collector.

To help combat this, I've been pointed to this new service at SpamBox.us where a temporary email is set up.  All emails to that account are forwarded to your real account which is hidden.  I just signed up for del.icio.us using this technique.  I got the confirmation email in my gmail account, but if any email is stored in a database, it'll be the cryptic cWP3rzqxIlLB8A3c@spambox.info that I signed up with.  The spambox email is temporary, anywhere from 30 minutes to one year.  After that, it's gone, along with any record to my real email address.

Do I trust SpamBox not to sell my email?  Not entirely. They say they won't you never know.  The way I see it though, is that if they do in fact sell it, it'll only becoming from one source rather than 35-50 accounts I have opened around the internet.

I hope this helps you keep your inboxes free of spam.