As seen in the past, the spammers steal our valuable life time with sending us porn, drugs and software offers, that we would never have dreamed of. The question is: where do those spammers get the email addresses from? And there are two simple answers.

First being the problem that anyone having a website, mostly also has provided a valid email address for contact purposes. Here in germany in most cases we are even legally obliged to provide such an address as imprint (Impressum). So spammers send robots to the net and harvest all those email addresses and write them back into databases and let them grow and grow. And after a while honorable databases have been generated with lots of email addresses.

Second being the problem that many administrators of forums offer their user databases as well to spammers, although they are not allowed to. Anyway it happens much too often.

At least for the second problem a solution has evolved. It is called “one time email addresses” or “trash email addresses”. Those addresses are valid for a particular amount of time and will cease to work after that.

One of those websites offering such services is http://www.guerrillamail.com/. They provide us with an email address that is working at least for 15 minutes. If that is too short you can manually prolong that address for another 15 minutes by simply clicking a button. We did not try to prolong for the maximum possible amount of time – so we don’t know. But we suspect there may be a time limitation.

When will you actively stop distributing your real email address on the net?