One-Time-Use E-Mail Addresses

Here’s my great idea for the day: single-use e-mail addresses.

They would work like this:

You sign up with a address company (e.g., “NoSpam.com”) that you give your real address to. When you need to provide a valid e-mail address on a site, you click a button and NoSpam would instantly generate an address — maybe “x43gti@akantor.nospam.com.” Ugly? Yeah. But who cares?

You could specify how long you wanted it to last — ten minutes (for one of those sites that sends a confirmation message), two weeks (for online shopping; it would last till your goods were delivered), or longer.

Let’s say you signed up for something at a site and generated an address — x43gti@akantor.nospam.com. You could set it to last for a long time and note where you gave it. If the address starts getting spam, you could turn it off…and not patronize that site.

(I do this already in a way, but giving out addresses that correspond to the place I’m giving it. For example, I used “nytimes@[a domain]” when signing up for the Times. If spam comes to that address, I know who gave out my address. But this is off the point.)

One-time-use e-mail addresses. You heard it here first.