On the odd occasion I do want to see carefully targeted messages from some of the companies that I deal with, yet at the same time don’t want to be bothered for evermore or run the risk of having my address passed around to other companies, I take advantage of disposable email…

Spamgourmet.com is my provider of choice for this service (There are plenty of others just a search away, but I can only vouch for the one I’ve been using for years.) The home page isn’t exactly web2.0 but it does the job…

Once you’ve created an account that points at your main mail address, you’re free to use any email address of the form:-

<unique-identifier.x.username>@spamgourmet.com

Where x is the maximum number of emails you want to receive from that unique address.

You can hand these out to anyone safe in the knowledge that once the sender hits the allotted number of allowed messages at the individual address, Spamgourmet will eat any further ones without troubling you. Handy, huh?