For most Internet users, spam is a daily hassle that can’t be remedied easily. Chances are that if you use Gmail, you’re less concerned about spam due to the excellent Gmail spam filter.
However, if you’re looking for a way to prevent untrusted web services from having your Gmail address and flooding you with spam, you should consider making an alias of your Gmail address to use when signing up for untrusted web sites.
What are Gmail address aliases? Since Gmail doesn’t recognize dots as valid characters within account name, adding or removing dots from a Gmail account name won’t change the actual destination. This means that firstname.lastname@gmail.com is the same as firstnamelastname@gmail.com.
How’s that useful for you? For untrusted web services, just use an email alias with a pre-positioned dot. For instance, if your Gmail address is securityhacks@gmail.com, change it to security.hacks@gmail.com when signing up for an untrusted web site. Once you have what you need (activation link, download link etc.), use the Gmail Filter settings to delete all emails with the destination address security.hacks@gmail.com.
In order to setup a Gmail Filter, under the Settings options, select the Filter tab and click on “Create a new filter”. In the To field type security.hacks@gmail.com, click the “Next Step” button and check “Delete It”. Now, click the “Create Filter” button to activate the filter. [Via Blogulate]
Comments
unfortunately this doesn’t work and i’ll tell you why:
all the information necessary to determine your REAL gmail address is available in whatever alias you happen to use, whether it involves adding extraneous dots or the +keyword trick…
not only is it trivial for a person to reverse the obfuscation involved in these tricks, it’s trivial to write a program to do the same and since the tricks are so well known and gmail is so popular it’s a certainty that there are email address harvesting bots already doing it…
I’ll be sure to try this out as I have a number of Gmail accounts for various uses from signups to spam to my regular email.
How about using a service called spamgourmet which lets you create disposable addresses?
Or, you could sign up for something like boxbe.com, and make the spammers pay you to get their spam to your inbox…
Ahh! but off course there are other uses to Gmail aliases.
One such use would be to extend the trail period of some software indefinitely! You already must have guessed it, the way this works is that you sign-up for a trail product (which usually lasts 30 days) and use a different Gmail alias to extend the expiry period to another month.. and so on (you can keep doing this).Most of the trail tracking softwares are pretty dumb to overlook the possibility of aliases. I am not saying that this is a panacea for all software products, but hey! even 5% of them all is a big number :-). Besides, you no more require to provide a different e-mail address for every sign-up!
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