Ohayo!,

It's Dilan 🤓!

Ah email, the new way to send letters as oppose to hand writen ones, has become an integrall part of our workflow today till we can't separate ourselves from it.

Everyone, me included, pocess an email address, it being from google, microsoft or your custom domain. An email address is used just like a digital passport. From receiving news about new chapters of my favorite anime to checking application status to programs and jobs email is at the core of all our current digital world. Near 99% of applications out there where we are required to sign up/in need an email address to authenticate ourself.

For so long I was confused by email and gmail, I thougth that Gmail and e-mail were synonyms, later on realized that it was just a good combo of word selection, replacing "e" by "G", what a genius the product designer was.

Another scenario might be that you register into a website with your personal email, afterwards the website in question get hacked and all their data is leak, creating a data leak. Now the attacker have your personal email address and one password you might have even used in multiple places accross your different accounts (Don't do that!).

. . .

Disposable email addresses or temporary address, protect you from unwanted spam and phishing attacks directed to your personal email inbox, online tracking, and other forms of data abuse, providing you with a stronger digital self-defense mechanism, and avoiding you the need to give away your personal e-mail address to each online service you need to make use of.

Now now now, all of that sounds great, and maybe also complicated, why the heck will I want to do that? when I can use only one email for every service I visit?? ¬_¬

That's an interesting and expected questions, so here are some good reasons why you should use a type of disposable email address:

• • The practice of buying and selling email addresses is a common one among digital data brokers. Say you register at an online shop to buy an item from a brand. The shop can then sell your email address to that same brand, so they can advertise to you directly in your email inbox or on other websites.
  • Protect your identity in the event of a data breach by making it difficult for hackers to cross-reference your accounts
  • You are a developer/tester or just an IT guy, want an email to quickly test out some applications or services, without the need to use your true informations

So how can I protect my real email address from spam, phishing attacks and all the rest??

Easy peasy, down here we are going to examine some quick and easy

solutions you can start using today, from the simpliest one to somewhat more complicated but stick with me, the journey will be worth it:

My Favorite one : Temp-Mail.org

As they say it so well (visit here) Forget about spam, advertising mailings, hacking and attacking robots. Keep your real mailbox clean and secure.! This one is a pepite, you being a developer or just someone trying to sign up to an online service, it gives you unlimited fake and temporary mails that can last up to 24hours!, with that you are can anonymously register on doubting websites or applications and be asure that your real address won't ever get revealed or leaked in a data leak.

More Complete : Addy.io

This one(visit here) is more complete, requiring sign up, it's an Anonymous Email Forwarding System. The concept here is a little bit different but the core principle stay same : keep you safe online! Here you create what's called an alias for your email, you can generate them on the fly or beforehand, once it's create you can use it to sign up to different services, you delete it whenever you want. The best part of this one is that you can self host the system yourself on your own server, more on it on their github here.

These different solutions allow you to generate disposable email addresses with a simple click, in most cases delivering messages straight to your inbox, while preventing your personal email address from being leaked.

Note that this may have an interesting side effect and help you learn about how companies are sharing your data: if you generate a disposable address for an online service 'A', and suddenly start receiving emails from another source 'B' through that address, then you know that service 'A' has granted service 'B' with access to your address (and perhaps other data).

As a closing thought: do you want to check if your email has ever been (publicly) leaked? Visit this website.

More to explore at :

• FireFox Relay : Firefox Relay⁩ protects your identity and your inbox with unique email masks
• For IPhone Users, check out Hide My Email with ICloud+
• Use IronVest masked email addresses so you don’t have to give away the real thing.
• 10 Minute MailFree : Anonymous Temporary E-mail

It was Dilan, NLP Enthousiast. See you soon! 👋