Email aliases and disposable email

Good web email services like Gmail allow you to use email aliases in quite a few ways. If you are a bit tech savvy, you'll already know that there are tons of blog posts and help posts on this including Gmail's own. I'll quickly cover it anyway for those who are still missing out on this:

Gmail

If you have registered an email ID "hello@gmail.com", you can also receive email at:

• hell.o@gmail.com
• hel.lo@gmail.com
• he.llo@gmail.com
• h.ello@gmail.com
• h.e.l.lo@gmail.com
• h.e.llo@gmail.com
• he.l.l.o@gmail.com
• hel.l.o@gmail.com
• h.e.l.l.o@gmail.com

- without doing anything (note that two periods / dots can not be consecutive). So you can use IDs to track who is mailing you and who gave your ID to some one. For example, if you gave your ID to only one person as "hell.o@gmail.com", you'll know that they are the one who leaked it if some one else mails you on it.

To use more meaningful aliases, you can use the + sign after your ID like:

hello+test@gmail.com

- you can use any word at all after the + sign. This will allow you to use filters to sort out your incoming mail to specific labels. You might want to use hello+subscriptions@gmail.com for subscribing to news letters and create a filter which sorts out all mail received to that ID to a label called Subscriptions. You can also think of any other clever uses of it.

You can also send email as these IDs, all you have to do (in Gmail) is:

Go to

> Settings

> Accounts

> Send mail as
and add it like any of the other IDs.

Google Apps

If you use Google Apps, and host your own domain on it, you can also add unlimited aliases (both for groups and users) with anyname@yourdomain.com that forward to your user (or group) email ID. This can be done by going to users (or groups) menu, selecting the user (or group) and adding nicknames.

If you have enabled a Catch-All email address on your hosted domain on Google Apps or any other service that has this option, you can make up email addresses at the spot and give them out and any mail sent to, for example, uncreatedID@domain.com will forward to your Catch-All address.

Yahoo and Hotmail

Other services like Hotmail (windows live) also provide these kinds of alias IDs now with the + sign.

If you use Yahoo, you can have 500 disposable email addresses at a time that are totally different from your personal Yahoo ID and Extra Yahoo ID. If you are using Yahoo Asia, you will already have this option. If not, here's how to convert to Yahoo Asia (keep in mind Yahoo has changed the location of mail options & account info menu but it's too obvious to find if you are used to your Yahoo inbox - the account information is under the same option as your sign out option while the mail options are under the gear button).

Once, you have shifted to Yahoo Asia, going to mail settings will show you "Disposable addresses" option in your settings menu tabs on the left. Create a base ID from that option (base ID is any unique identifier that has no mention of your own ID). Now you will be able to create and delete disposable email addresses that once you delete will no longer send mail to your yahoo inbox.

Arbitrary

If you are looking for arbitrary email addresses that you want to use just for some time and later not care about them, try one of these (or leave any of your own in comments):

Mail Expire: Expires at your present time.
10 Minute Mail: Expires in ten minutes - lets you have extra ten minutes as many times as you want.