As strange as it may sound nowadays, my email experience is almost spam free. I have to thank Fastmail.FM for implementing Sieve filtering and SpamAssassin in their excellent email service, which made this possible.

However, as another level of protection I’ve been using SpamGourmet. This is a fantastic, transparent system that just loves spam. It “eats” it. Once you create an account, whenever you face one of those “Please enter your email address” in places where there’s no need for it, or the site looks suspicious, just enter an address of type someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com, where someword is a word of your choice, x is the number of email messages you want to receive at this address (for example 3) and user is your username. The first 3 messages sent to this address will be forwarded to your account, all subsequent messages will be “eaten” by spamgourmet. The whole process is transparent, which means you never ever have to visit spamgourmet again (no-brainer mode). Very elegant! Of course, you can use the advanced mode if needed which provides more flexibility, but does require some maintenance.

So, before you submit your real email to a suspicious site again, open an account with SpamGourmet and let it eat the spam before the spam eats you.

Tags: SpamGourmet, Spam