SPAM? Never Heard of it.
Name: TrashMail Price: Free
Why does SPAM exist? Put simply, you provided your email address to someone who was may have given you something in return, but sold your email address on the way.
SPAM is unsolicited mail. It is both annoying and wastes time; however it is still very successful. Companies send these emails that most of us ignore. But there are some people, say 5% at most, who do buy those cheap watches or participate in special offers. This makes the whole thing worthwhile for the spammers.
Unsolicited messages are sent to you though a number of means. If you use a free email provider like Gmail, or a well known company such as AOL, spammers will probably get to you by guessing your email address. They send millions of emails to accounts that never exist. But that’s not the only way. As previously mentioned, spammers may buy yours and other people’s email addresses when you sign up for free or other account-based products. You are then promptly added to the list.
Other than creating a sophisticated, unique email address that will be hard to remember, you can create aliases when entering in your email address online. TrashMail is a very useful service which lets you create an email alias that expires after it receives X amount of emails or after a certain amount of time (whichever comes first). You can then safely give your email address to anyone you like, and SPAM will be largely reduced. This also applies to showing your email on a website (a forum is a good example). The team at TrashMail have created a Firefox extension where you can easily and instantly give out your @trashmail.net email address online, specifying where emails sent there should really end up.
Unfortunately, SPAM is not going to ever go away. The US and international courts may be tracking down and jailing/fining the biggest names in the ‘industry,’ but smaller spammers will always continue to cause agony. TrashMail is the best way to help reduce the waste of time that SPAM presents.
