Spam can hardly be avoided, but it can be managed. The start of any fight against this email menace is a firm decision to stop leaving your email on many websites around the Internet. This way, the chance of your email address falling into the wrong hands gets minimized.
However, sometimes we do want (or need) to access some service that asks us for the email address. Then what? Are we going to leave our email there or…
If the requirement is to enter an email — and you need to access that service — you will have to comply. The trick is NOT to leave your primary email which you want to be as spam-free as possible.
So instead of giving away your main email address…
Use an email forwarding service
The “advent” of spam helped create a new sector that involves companies offering an email forwarding service. Once you sign-up for one of those services, you will get a new email which you can then use on websites across the Internet — instead of your primary email.
Once a message has been received on this new email, it will be automatically forwarded to your real email address. So the website owner/operator won’t know your primary email.
There are quite a few such services out there and most offer a two-tier service: there is a free version and the premium one that comes with a price tag. This paid offering comes with a few extra bells and whistles, such as allowing you to create multiple email aliases and manage them from a single location.
Among the most popular options are AnonAddy and SimpleLogin, but there is also Hide My Email from Apple, which realized it could help its customers fight spam with a service like this.
Also worth noting is DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection service. It is free to use and since it comes from privacy champions behind the DuckDuckGo search engine, we like it a lot.
Should you get an email forwarding service?
We think the answer is YES. No matter how little spam you get, an email forwarding service will let you be more anonymous on the Internet — making it that much harder for all kinds of companies to track you down online.
Their biggest advantage is that they are easy to use and don’t require any special software. Just pick your faux email address and see all the suspicious emails ending up there. You can then flag, tag or label it accordingly and eventually unsubscribe from notifications you don’t like. It’s actually rather easy to get back control of your inbox with email forwarding services and we encourage you to try them out. Good luck! 😉