100 billion (!) email spam – unsolicited bulk email – or junk mail per day cause tens of billions of dollars costs per year - offering anything from sexual crutches to unbelievable business opportunities allegedly making you rich in a matter of weeks. They originate from around the globe, here are the main sources of spam by country of origin (Source: Sophos ► 2008).

Even if you don’t get 4 million junk mails ►, those ending up in your inbox do not only pose your security at risk, but also quite simply give you a hard time in finding the messages you really want or need to read – and thus waste your most valuable resource: your precious time. So it follows your main goal is to avoid spam or junk mail ending up in your inbox in the first place.

A jester might say go back to snail mail and don’t use the internet – but is it really your solution? As it is with so many pests your prime objective is to avoid “infection” in the first place. To achieve this you will have to check your basic security precautions:

Spam – and allow me to state the obvious – is delivered to your inbox – to your email address. So if you succeed in keeping that email address from spammers, you will not receive any “unsolicited bulk email” – no spam, no junk. Let’s carefully examine your email policy.

That’s easy to answer: two plus any number. One private email address for people you trust fully, one public for any “official” business and rather distant contacts and any number of trash-mails to deal with all those sites, forums, chat rooms, vendors and contacts of unknown trustworthiness you encounter in the internet.

Set up one email address for private purposes only. Be extremely discrete, even secretive about this private email address, and share it only with reliable people whom you know to be as security aware as yourself. Never use it in a public place like chat rooms, forums or when leaving a blog comment.

This email address you need for any “official” or public correspondence. You will use it with your boss, your bank, your landlord, people you know but don’t belong to your “inner” circle. Guard it with extreme care, do not use it in public places, for registering purposes or subscribing to newsletters. A rule of thumb is: this email is still for correspondence on a person to person basis, i.e. you will know whom you’re talking to or from whom you get the email.

Create one address for gathering information in form of reputable newsletters. You will need this one only if you’re reading quite a lot of newsletters, and it is very convenient to receive them for instance in an email client like ► Opera M2. M2 is Opera's in-built email client and allows you to follow up easily on any information in the newsletter you want to check.

Disposable email addresses, throw-away addresses or trash-mails you use wherever you’re asked to leave an email address in the open space of the world wide web. They are for chat rooms, public forums, registering with sites you do not trust; use them whenever common sense and experience tell you – regardless of any eloquent privacy statement, you will get 3rd-Party offers galore and eventually this email address will end up on a spammers list. As this is a throw-away email address you will do exactly that: once you discover you’re getting spam on that disposable email address – dispose of it, throw it away, and do not use it any longer.

These addresses are designed for one time use only, say if you want to register at a site you don’t intend to revisit or are not sure about the privacy policy of that site, you simply create such a trash-mail on the fly for this one and only occasion, the confirmation mail is send to this throw-away email address, you click on the confirmation link, and completely forget about the email address. You do not need it any longer.

You need to be quite clear about the fact that these disposable emails are in no way a secure means of communication. The inbox of those services does not belong to you; anyone has access to it, and can read “your” mail.

The emails sent to those trash-mails are usually auto-deleted after a certain period of time, and so is the trash-mail address itself: after some time it simply expires. Both the email address and the email received have a short life time – unless you use a Yahoo-Mail Account which offers you a permanent but also disposable email address linked to your regular one.

Disposable email addresses are not intended to substitute your regular email but for helping you avoiding spam.

TRASHMAIL.NET offers beyond the expected functionality a Firefox extension to make use of the site. The extension helps you to create easily trash-mail addresses, and insert the address very comfortably via right click into the corresponding field. Incoming emails are forwarded to one of your regular email addresses – so in a manner of speaking you have to register. We suggest you create a special email address for that purpose in order not to compromise your permanent ones.

You are entitled to have up to 300 active throw-away emails at any one time the use of which is facilitated by the extension’s Address Manager – very nifty indeed! Messages are forwarded up to 10 times to any single trash-mail, which will expire after one month. But visiting your administration page you may reset many options manually.

Homepage: http://en.trashmail.net/ Download Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1813

If registering or even providing a regular email address is not your cup of tea, then mailinator is for you. This trash mail service doesn’t require any kind of registration -simply use it by thinking of a throw-away address. Here is how it is done...

The mailinator disposable email address consists of two parts. Common to all is the domain “@mailinator.com”. You only have to think of a beginning for the email address like: “fIA6JwnkaVKc” or “nomorejunk”. This will give you a throw-away email address This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it (or “ This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ”). Of course the first part is only limited by your imagination – or by the number of combinations a password generator produces.

You access your trash mail address via web browser or RSS (very convenient), any throw-away email holds up to 10 messages, and after a couple hours these messages will be auto-deleted.

Homepage: http://www.mailinator.com/index.jsp