Every email user is sadly familiar with the problem of spam. Unsolicited commercial email is annoying to receive, often offensive in its subject matter, and even dangerous if the email bears a virus or an attempt to take over your online identity.
But there's a solution to this most irritating of problems. Using a temporary or disposable email service will tackle the spam issue extremely effectively, while also providing many other important benefits. Here are eight key ways using a throwaway email address will improve your online life.
1. Reduce Spam Volume in Your Main Inbox
The first and perhaps most important reason to use temporary email addresses is to stop spam from overloading your personal email inbox. When you sign up to a new website, blog, or other service using a temporary email, your real address is hidden from prying eyes and can't be used for spam. What's more, the temporary email address can be set to expire shortly after you've used it, so if it does wind up on a spam mailing list, the messages will never reach your inbox.
2. Protecting Your Online Privacy
Using temporary email addresses also helps to protect your online privacy, as there's no way for any website to trace the disposable email back to your real account. This extra layer of security provides an important protection against identity theft, helping to stop hackers from accessing your most important accounts such as online banking or stores which hold your credit card details.
3. Insulation from Poor Security
Similarly, if you register at a website using a temporary email address, you don't need to worry whether that site has strong security in place. Even if the service is hacked and their user data is compromised, it's only your temporary email address that needs to be canceled for security's sake, not your primary address.
If you're at all unsure about giving your private details out to a new site, using temporary email addresses can provide valuable reassurance.
4. Better Email Organization
For many email users, the sheer volume of messages makes finding the important ones more difficult. If you've ever missed a vital email and lost out because of it, you'll appreciate how multiple temporary emails can clean up the clutter. Using 'burner' emails for non-serious purposes such as discussion forums or social media means you can filter all the mail associated with those accounts, keeping your main inbox satisfyingly neat and tidy.
5. Creating Multiple Accounts
It's often useful to have more than one account active on the same website. For example, you might want to keep separate personal and professional accounts on the same social media site. Using temporary email addresses makes it easy to create as many accounts as you need, all without the service provider being able to detect your activity.
6. More Cloud Storage Space
Temporary email addresses also make it easier to increase your storage space at cloud providers such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. Most of these services offer a small amount of space on a free plan, and with disposable emails, you can sign up for multiple accounts to increase your overall capacity.
7. Find Out Who's Tracking You
Using a temporary email address can help you determine which accounts are responsible for your spam problems. When you use a different address for every account you set up, you'll know exactly who's leaked your information to a spam database when the first unsolicited mail arrives in your inbox.
8.Leave No Trails
Lastly, by their nature, temporary email addresses don't leave a permanent record of their use. After a certain amount of time, the email address and any messages it receives are completely deleted, leaving no trace behind. If you're keen on online anonymity, a temporary email address can be a great ally.
Conclusion
For all these reasons and more, signing up for a temporary email service could make your online life simpler and more secure, reducing your email overload while protecting your online identity from being compromised.
