Tech: A Taste for Spam?

Spam, once known by the less-picturesque name of "unsolicited commercial e-mail" or UCE, is one of the great scourges of the Net.

According to MessageLabs, currently 67% of all e-mail traffic is spam.? At one point in July, last year, spam reached a whopping 94.5% of all e-mail traffic.

That's a lot of e-mail about questionable diets, unsavoury personal practices, suspicious medications, illegal pyramid schemes and vile pornography.

So, how do you prevent spam? One excellent tool in this continuing battle is spamgourmet.com, whose icon is that strange image above. Spamgourmet provides free, disposable e-mail addresses.

The key to preventing spam starts with protecting your e-mail address. However, there are many circumstances which require you to provide a valid address: online newspaper registration, software downloads, blogs, etc. You might reasonably fear that some of these groups may not entirely trustworthy with your precious e-mail address.

Enter spamgourmet. It allows you to create disposable e-mail addresses. A disposable e-mail address is an address that will work for a time, then stop working. Thus you can give out your e-mail address freely, and you may suffer some spam for a time, which will suddenly stop when that address is no longer valid.

After registering with spamgourmet and giving them your normal e-mail (you have to trust somebody, right?), you can create any number of temporary addresses which will be provided by the web site. Admittedly, these addresses look a little strange (e.g. mytmp.10.tomgee@spamgourmet.com), but it seems a small price to pay for protecting your inbox.

There are many other functions provided by this excellent service. If you've finished buying all the cheap Prozac you'll ever need, check them out!