Saturday, November 18, 2006

Truly Disposable Gmail Address

Disposable Yahoo! email address can be made on top of their original Yahoo! email. Gmail has similar thing by letting you receive emails sent to basename+keyword@gmail.com in the basename@gmail.com account, but sooner or later spammers will spam your original address because the prefixes are the same. To make a truly disposable Gmail address with alternative base name:

  1. Create a new Gmail (preferably with shorter name).
  2. Set auto forwarding from the new Gmail to primary Gmail.
  3. In the primary Gmail, create a filter having "basename OR basename+ -keyword" in the "To:" field, where basename+keyword@gmail.com are given out.
  4. In the next step, select whatever you want to do with the spams, say "delete".
To clarify, you get a new Gmail a@gmail.com, and give out a+b@gmail.com to a website, the "To:" field of the filter in your primary Gmail c@gmail.com should read "a OR a+ -b". In future, when more disposable address are made say a+d@gmail.com, just append " -d" to the filter.

Filters are not set up in the new Gmail (and hence step 2) so that no logout is needed to modify the filter. The "To:" field allows about 1400 characters, so many disposable addresses can be filtered (even if it is full, create up to 20 filters, or even get create in the new Gmail or at worst, get another new Gmail for more filters...).

5 comments:

Ben said...

yep, better than the original - well done.. but can i be bothered..?

Anonymous said...

hei, maybe you can use this one http://odaymail.com, it's disposable email service, you can read, writer, reply, forward online, just like webmail.

drysen said...

http://odaymail.com is cool, thanks you can forward to my real email or read online

meandme said...

another one is http://www.litedrop.com really simple to use

ikaruga said...

Yeah, well-done!
My only question is can you reply to email using the disposable email? If you're subscribing to a mailing list, any emails you send need to be from that email; otherwise it gets reject