Address Protection HOWTO

Spam Gourmet

Spam Gourmet (www.spamgourmet.com) is the ultimate in
on-the-fly disposable email addresses. The name comes from its creators desire to “eat” as much spam as
possible! Its use is somewhat complicated at first, so listen carefully…

First, go to
www.spamgourmet.com
and create an account.
Standard fare, nothing to see here folks. Just two quick points though:

• They do ask for an email address. This is important as they forward the “real” mail that
  comes through their system to it. So don’t make one up!
• Try to make your username as small as possible (ie with as few letters/numbers as possible). This just
  makes your disposable email addresses shorter. Handy, but not essential

That’s basically it. You do not need to create your addresses first like you do with Address Guard, they are
literally created “on-the-fly”.

The addresses have the following format:


EMAILNAME.NUMBER.USERNAME@spamgourmet.com


Where:

• EMAILNAME = the name you give the address. This could be anything. For example, if you are
  signing up for an amazon account, you could make it “amazon”
• NUMBER = How many message do you want to receive to this address before they start getting
  “eaten”. This can be any number (but the most you can set it to is 20, any higher number will still
  only allow 20 through) or any letter or word. If alpha is included instead of numberic, then the
  point at which the first letter of the word appears in the alphabet is the number allowed
  (a=1, b=2 etc). NB: It is possible to “reset” this number on the spamgourmet page, but I won’t
  go into that here.
• USERNAME = your spamgourmet username
• @ spamgourmet.com – there are other alternatives (all the domains registered by the spamgourmet folks).
  I personally use xoxy.net because it is the shortest.

So when you sign up to amazon, put your address at amazon.10.user@xoxy.net and you will get up to 10
messages from them (or whichever spammers they have shared your address with) and then all further messages will be “eaten”.

A few points:

• You can add “trusted senders” (or domains) so that all messages from that address will get
  delivered and not advance the number of messages. You can add any number or senders to your account (which
  will work for any of your addresses) and/or each individual address can have one trusted sender.
• If you reply to a message that comes through the spamgourmet system, it goes back via
  spamgourmet and looks to the recipient as if it had come from your disposable email address.
• You can (using a form on the spamgourmet page) generate an address to send a message to so
  that it will appear as if it has come from one of your email addresses (this works in the same way
  as the reply trick above)
• The home page has heaps of added features for managing your addresses. Please explore
  further (though I am happy to help if I can, email me at
  public.email.mule@xoxy.net
  for assistance
• If you start to get lots of unwanted messages from an address you can always drop the number of messages
  remaining down to zero and hide it and not use it any more. You do not delete these addresses, because
  if you did, it would just get regenerated the first time someone emailed it again!