Stop spam emails before they start: one address per signup

You gave one online shop your email to get a discount code. A few weeks later your inbox fills with offers from companies you have never heard of, and you cannot tell who passed your address on. The simplest way to stop spam emails like these is to stop giving out your real address: give every site you sign up for an address of its own.

Then spam lands in an inbox you can ignore, and the address it was sent to tells you which site let it out. It takes about as long as typing your usual address, and it works before the spam starts, not after.

Why filters alone will not stop spam emails

The usual advice on spam is to filter, block and unsubscribe. Those help, but they all start after the spam has arrived. Once your address is on a list, you cannot take it back. It can be copied, shared with partners, sold, or exposed in a data breach, and every copy can lead to more.

Filters also get it wrong in both directions. A real email, like a delivery update, ends up in junk, while some spam still slips through. The fewer places your real address appears, the less your filter has to guess.

One address per signup, and why it works

Instead of typing your real address into every form, give each site an address of its own. It is like giving every shop a different phone number. If one number starts ringing with sales calls, you know exactly which shop passed it on.

That gives you three things:

• You know where spam came from, because each address went to only one place.
• You can walk away from an address without touching your real inbox.
• If one site is breached, only that site's address leaks, not the one your bank and friends use.

Your real address is for people and important accounts. Everything else gets an address of its own.

Set it up in five steps

Here is the whole process with freemail:

1. Open freemail.site. You get a working address straight away, with no signup and no password.
2. Paste that address into the signup form on the site you are joining.
3. Wait a moment. New mail shows up live, without refreshing.
4. If the email has a verification code, copy it in one click and finish signing up.
5. For the next site, make a new inbox and repeat.

The address never expires, so the site can still reach you later, for example with a password reset. Only the messages are temporary. On the Free plan they are kept for 7 days, then deleted.

Want your inboxes on your phone and your laptop, or safe after you clear your browser? Sign in with your email and a six digit code. There is no password. Without signing in, your inboxes are tied to the browser you made them in.

Try it on the next site that asks for your email. Open your free inbox now.

Make ten free inboxes go further

The Free plan gives you up to 10 inboxes, keeps up to 100 messages in each, and accepts up to 50 new messages a day across all of them. If you sign up for a lot of things, one inbox per site will run out, so group them instead:

• One for shopping and coupons
• One for newsletters
• One for free trials
• One for downloads and single use forms

You lose a little detail, since you learn which group leaked rather than which site, but you keep most of the benefit.

If you want a separate address for every site, Pro gives you 50 inboxes for $4 a month and lets you choose the names, so each address can be named after the site it belongs to. Max gives you 150 inboxes for $10 a month.

When spam arrives, the address tells you who leaked it

1. Look at the address the junk was sent to. It points to the site, or the group of sites, that let it out.
2. Do not click links in obvious spam. A click can tell the sender that someone reads that address.
3. Stop giving that address out, and move any account you still want to a fresh one.
4. Leave the old messages alone. They are deleted on schedule, so old junk clears itself out.

Keep your real address for what matters

One address per signup is for the many sites you use once, or only now and then. Your bank, your doctor, government services and your job should get your real address, because losing access to those accounts costs far more than a bit of spam. There is more on where to draw that line in is temporary email safe.

A freemail inbox also only receives mail. You cannot send or reply from it, which suits signups but not conversations. If you would rather have mail forwarded to your normal inbox, that is what an email alias does. The two are compared in disposable email vs email alias.

Common questions

How do I stop spam emails I already get?

Mark them as spam so your filter learns, and unsubscribe from real companies you once signed up with. For obvious junk, do not click anything at all. Then cut off new spam at the source by giving future signups their own addresses.

How can I avoid spam when signing up for a website?

Give the site an address of its own instead of your real one, and untick any boxes that offer to send you deals. A temporary inbox gives you a fresh address right away, and you still receive the confirmation email or code. If the site sends junk later, it lands away from your personal inbox.

Does a separate address stop all spam?

No, but it changes where spam goes. Mail sent to a leaked address still arrives, just not in your real inbox, and you know which site it came from. You can stop using that address and give the site a new one if you still need the account.