Disposable email address
Disposable email addresses are unique email addresses employed for specific contacts or uses. This is primarily done so that if the email address becomes compromised or utilized in connection with email abuse, the address owner can easily cancel it without affecting their other contacts.
Uses
DEAs allows a unique email address for every sender or recipient combination. It can be employed in scenarios where someone may sell or release an individual's email address to spam lists or other unethical entities. The most common situations of this type involve online registration for sites offering discussion groups, bulletin boards, chat rooms, online shopping, and file hosting services.If a DEA is jeopardized/used in a manner not intended by the owner, it can be easily canceled at any time.
DEAs typically forward to one or more genuine email mailboxes where the owner receives and reads messages. The contact with whom a DEA is shared never learns the owner's real email address. If a database manages the DEA, it can also quickly identify the expected sender of each message by retrieving the associated contact name of each unique DEA. If used properly, DEAs can also help identify which recipients handle email addresses carelessly or illegitimately. Moreover, it can serve as a tool for spotting fake messages or phishers.
Advantages
Ideally, owners share a specific DEA with each contact or entity. Thus, if the DEA should ever change, only one recipient needs to be updated. By comparison, the traditional practice of giving the same email address to multiple recipients means that if that address subsequently changes, many legitimate recipients need to receive notification of the change and update their records.Additionally, because DEAs serve as a layer of indirection between the sender and recipient, if the DEA user's actual email address changes for any reason, the user need only update the DEA service provider about the change. Afterward, all outstanding DEAs will continue to function without updating.
As DEAs can be restricted to one recipient, owners can more easily identify likely point of compromise for any spam that the account receives. This allows users to determine the trustworthiness of the people with whom they share their DEAs. "Safe" DEAs that have not been abused can be forwarded to a real email account, while messages sent to "compromised" DEAs can be routed to a special folder, sent to the trash, held for spam filtering, or returned as undeliverable if the DEA has been deleted.
Methods
Sub-addressing
A number of email systems support sub-addressing, also known as "plus" or "tagged" addressing, where a tag can be appended to the local portion of an email address but with the modified address being an alias to the unmodified address. For example, the address joeuser+tag@example.com denotes the same delivery address as joeuser@example.com. The text of the tag may be used to apply filtering, or to create single-use addresses.If available, this feature can allow users to create their own disposable addresses. However, this system reveals the user's delivery address to email recipients.
Multiple email aliases
Another approach is to register multiple auxiliary email addresses as aliases which forward all mail to one main address. The advantage of this approach is that the user can easily detect which auxiliary email is receiving spam and block or dispose of it.Some services require additional time to set up forwarding, but others allow the spontaneous creation of new addresses without having to register them with the service in advance.
Although this method allows storage and access of all emails from a single account, some services require separate passwords for each alias.