Disposable email addresses at your disposal

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A very oddly named service can help you solve your spam problems.  And no… it can’t eliminate spam, but it can keep your other email addresses out of the hands of spammers.

Every time you sign up for something on the Web, you have to use one of your email addresses. And while most companies keep your email private, there’s always a chance that your email address may be inadvertently exposed. Plus there are times when you want to sign p for something – a newsletter, a freeware program where you have to provide an email address in order to receive a free registration key, or some service where an email address is required for site access. Sometimes you’re not familiar with some of these sites and you’re not sure if you can trust your email address with them or not.

What you need is a nice disposable email address.

Disposable Email Addressing is a safe way to share your email address. With a disposable email address a service creates a new email address every time you register for something. The service (in this case GishPuppy) automatically forwards messages to your regular email address (or whatever email address you’d like it forwarded to). You can simply “dispose” of that address when it is no longer needed without affecting anything else.

And this from the GishPuppy site says it all: “GishPuppy Disposable Email Addresses are a better choice because they are the easiest to use. Now you can quickly leave a GishPuppy address without ever sharing your real email address with strangers again.”

GishPuppy is a free service that requires you to register using a real email address. We’ve tested this service and we find them trustworthy. They need a real email address because their service forwards mail from your disposable email address (one you create with GishPuppy) to your real email address. That’s the beauty of the disposable email address. Rather than sharing your real email address or addresses with dozens and dozens of sites, you only have to share it with GishPuppy. One word of caution: GishPuppy warns users not to use GishPuppy for “mission critical” emails – whatever you deem that to be. This is more of a disclaimer of responsibility than an indication that you can’t trust GishPuppy to deliver important emails to you. Think about it – who wants to get sued?

Here is more information from the GishPuppy site:

“Email Registration is a Fact of Life

Whatever you do on the web (i.e. buy online, download stuff, read the news, sign up for newsletters, post on bulletin boards, chats, etc.) it seems like you always have to register and leave your email address. Sometimes you don’t mind because you trust the company (i.e. Amazon, eBay, etc.), and you believe that they will try to keep your personal information private. Other times, you are not sure. Plus, even the biggest companies make mistakes. What do you do?

… sometimes you do need to create an account to receive a message or a service, for example:

order confirmations from an online purchases,
coupons, rebates or other promotional offers,
picture sharing services,
social networking or dating services,
online games or gaming,
newsletters, bulletin boards, discussion groups, or
domain name registrations. (This last one is guaranteed to get you SPAM.)
Now, instead of sharing your real email address, or even your “SPAM” email address, you can leave a disposable email address.

How It Works

With GishPuppy, you can easily create a different GishPuppy email each time you register on the web. You can also cancel GishPuppy emails whenever you want, or set them to automatically expire after a certain amount of time. This is important because if that GishPuppy email “accidentally” gets in the hands of SPAMMERs, you can cancel it without affecting anyone else. Your private email is safe, and all your other web registrations are still available.

GishPuppy protects you from “Phishing” by letting you easily spot a message sent to the “wrong” address. For example, here is an email received from “eBay” that was clearly sent to an email address harvested from a post at Google Groups…”

If you need to enter your email address and it has to be one that allows a site to contact you, you should consider GishPuppy. While the name might sound cheesy, the service is not. It will help you keep your real email addresses more pristine.

Disposable email addresses at your disposal. Visit GishPuppy at http://gishpuppy.com/ and start living in a disposable world!