"Throwaway" Email Accounts
We've all seen them, "free" products in exchange for your soul email address.
I was recently made aware of a site offering a number of free products, just for entering an email address.
Once signed up to this site, I realised that what I'd actually signed up for was a list of links, each taking me to a form where I could submit my email address again! A great deal for each marketer involved, they all get a copy of my email address for their newsletters.
I have a domain name with "catch all" email forwarding enabled. This means that anything@mydomain.com will forward to my main email account.
An example of usage:
If I was to sign up to the osworld.biz newsletter, I would put "osworld" in the first name field, and "osworld@mydomain.com" in the email address field. This makes any email sent from the osworld newsletter easy to spot, and easy to block if needs be. If anyone sells my details, I'll know who it was based on the email address that has been used.
This also reminds me not to pay too much attention to the newsletter itself, which tends to happen when a message starts "Hi Oli…" 
Most (if not all) hosts will support this feature, and I recommend using it to protect your email address.
Comment by Stu — August 23, 2006 @ 8:07 pm
Hi Oli, I wrote about this very thing a couple of weeks ago here
I actually got the idea from my dad, he was Managing Director of a company, and subsequently got a lot of "offers" from companies. So what he did was to give each of them a different variation or spelling of his name, so he could track who was selling his name to who.
Good fun, but in this day of spam, it makes it really easy to block - just bloack that variation of your email address.
Comment by Pidea — August 24, 2006 @ 12:32 pm
Burt, I'm not sure that what you're suggesting is such a good idea.
You see it's dead easy to knock together a script that takes a live domain name (just scrape them off of a Google search results page) and then stick anything@ in front of it to make a valid email address. Anyone running a catchall email address will then get that email forwarded to their main account.
The only way around this is to filter your incoming emails to restrict emails sent specifically to the emails that you created.
Alternatively you can run a free anti-spam package such as described in this tutorial here:
[url=http://www.opportunitywales.co.uk/2-10-2-14]filter your spam emails for free[/url]
(takes a while to load, even on broadband).