Spam Gourmet eats junk
I discovered an innovative anti-spam tool today while browsing SourceForge. It’s called Spamgourmet and at no cost it’s worth every second it takes to register. From the web site:
If you give your email address to everyone, you are bound to receive spam emails, and you won’t know where they came from. Wouldn’t it be convenient to give a different email address to every business or web site, while getting all your email as before? Wouldn’t it be easiest to assume the address will be given to spammers, and have it work as a spam blocker by shutting off automatically unless you decide otherwise?
To register you nominate a protected email address, create a user name and password.
Spamgourmet will forward to this address all the emails sent to your spamgourmet disposable addresses — that way you don’t have to tell anyone else what it is.
After you have confirmed your protected address, you can give out self-destructing disposable email addresses whenever you want. The disposable addresses are like someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com, where someword is a word you have never used before, x is the number of email messages you want to receive at this address (up to 20), and user is your user name.
After you have received the designated number of messages, anything else sent to that address gets eaten before it arrives in your mailbox.
I see this as a great tool for when an email address is required for a competition or web site you don’t know much about. You probably just need to use that email address once, so why risk it appearing on a spam list; use a disposable!
I’ve tested Spamgourmet and it works.
I'm a 41-year-old father of four working as a newspaper editor at Mount Gambier in South Australia.
