Hassle-Free Disposable E-mail Accounts

Tired of ads for penis enlargement pills and other time-wasting nonsense in your inbox? Using a disposable e-mail address can help cut down on the amount of spam that makes its way into your primary e-mail account. Disposable e-mail addresses can be used when you create accounts at websites that require registration verification using an e-mail address, but with whom you aren't comfortable providing your primary or home e-mail address. There are some excellent sites that provide this service to the web community free of charge.

Guerrilla Mail (http://www.guerrillamail.com/) is a self-destructing, receive only service that provides e-mail accounts that are good for fifteen minutes. After fifteen minutes, the account and any messages sent to it are expunged from the system. There is no registration or membership required to use the service. Guerrilla Mail provides the option to extend the life of the account for an additional fifteen minutes for as many times as you like. But once your automatically generated address expires, you have to request a new one.

PookMail (http://www.pookmail.com/) allows you the flexibility of choosing any user name you like. Accounts can be accessed and viewed by anyone just by entering the user name, so you'll want to be careful not to use any personal information when signing up for a website if you choose to use a PookMail address for diverting spam from your primary e-mail account. Like Guerrilla Mail, PookMail does not require registration or membership in order to use the service. The life of PookMail accounts is indefinite, however, the site expunges all messages from the system after 24 hours.

Dodgeit (http://www.dodgeit.com/) is a no-frills, receive only account that, like PookMail, has an indefinite lifespan. Again, anyone can log in to view an account, so take precautions and don't use personal information in association with a Dodgeit e-mail address. Dodgeit allows users their choice of user name, offers RSS subscriptions to accounts and allows you to purchase password protection for an account for a nominal free (payable through PayPal). There is no registration or membership requirement in order to use the service. Messages, however, seem to hang around for a very long time, and Dodgeit's policy for expunging messages from their server is unknown.

MailEater (http://www.maileater.com/) is much like some of the other services. There is no registration or membership required. User names can be chosen, and anyone can log in to read the contents of an account. MailEater expunges messages from all accounts after four hours.

These are only a few (and the most hassle-free) of the options available on the web for diverting spam from your primary e-mail account. There are other services which require registration and membership, and who function on a model of creating and hosting addresses which act as aliases for real accounts. A service built on this model may be what you want if you want to avoid having to remember user names for each site that you use.