Protect Yourself by Protecting Your Email Address
No doubt, keeping your email address secret from the public will help you avoid spam. But there are more significant benefits gained from such a practice.
Surprisingly enough, an email address is the key to its owner online identity. On many social networking sites, locating a specific person is as easy as searching for their email address. More and more online services use email addresses as the account username. In other words, knowledge of someone’s email address makes it easier to locate any pertinent personal information for exploitation (or even worse, indulgement).
I’ve already talked about how a contact form lets you accept inquiries while keeping your email address secret. Another option we should consider is using a disposable email address.
It’s easier to explain how a disposable email address (DEA) works through an example. Let’s say your real email address is realaddress@b5media.com. You set up a separate email address, say emailmehere@b5media.com, which automatically forwards the messages it receives to realaddress@b5media.com. While spam messages sent to emailmehere will end up on your inbox, you can be certain that no one will know what your email address really is.
Even better, if and when you decide that emailmehere is receiving too much spam, all you have to do is disable it and come up with a new DEA, like emailmehere2@b5media.com. You no longer have to set up a new email account—and tell your contacts about it—as you’re email address remains safe and sound.
In short, by publicizing a DEA and keeping your real email address a secret, you still remain open to inquiries and questions—while keeping the bad elements from taking advantage of that openness.
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POSTED IN: Great Advice
2 opinions for Protect Yourself by Protecting Your Email Address
Sean Hodge
Dec 14, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Good idea on creating disposable email addresses as an extra security layer.
Joff
Dec 18, 2007 at 5:54 pm
DEAs are also great to see where unscrupulous websites have sold your address onto mailing lists.
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