How to Get Rid of Spam Without Ever Changing Your Email Address

The moment you type your email address into a signup form on some site, there’s a chance that address will end up on a spam list one day. A store you signed up with just to get a discount code starts emailing you daily promotions a few months later. Worse, if that site’s database gets leaked, your email address can become the target of other scam attempts too.

Most people just accept this problem, thinking “I guess I have to live with spam now.” But there are two simple ways to solve this without ever changing — or even ever sharing — your real email address.

Method 1: Gmail’s Plus-Sign Trick That Almost Nobody Knows About

If you use Gmail, you already have a tool at your disposal that you probably haven’t noticed. Gmail lets you add a “+” sign to your email address followed by any word you like, and the incoming emails still land in your real inbox.

For example, if your address is ahmetyilmaz@gmail.com, you could type ahmetyilmaz+shopping@gmail.com when signing up on a shopping site. The email still comes to you, but now you can see exactly which address that site is using to reach you.

The practical benefit is this: if you ever want to automatically filter spam emails coming from that site, you can go into Gmail’s filter settings and use the condition “to: ahmetyilmaz+shopping@gmail.com” to route everything sent to that address straight to the archive or trash. It also lets you notice exactly which site a data leak involving your email address came from, since the extra word at the end of the address gives you the clue.

This method works similarly in Outlook and iCloud Mail, though it isn’t as widely supported as it is in Gmail.

Method 2: A Temporary (Disposable) Email Address

Sometimes you only need to sign up on a site once — say, to download a file or access a PDF. In these cases, you don’t need to give out your real address at all.

Sites like temp-mail.org or guerrillamail.com generate a random email address in seconds. You give that address to the site in question and can read the verification email right on the same page. The address deletes itself automatically after a certain period of time.

1. Go to temp-mail.org.
2. Copy the automatically generated email address.
3. Use this address on the site you want to sign up on.
4. You’ll see the incoming verification email right on the same page, in the inbox section.

Which One to Use, and When

The plus-sign trick makes more sense for accounts you’ll use long-term but that carry spam potential. Since it’s still your real email, you also won’t miss important notifications about your account.

A temporary email is suitable for one-off, low-stakes signups. It should never be used for banking, social media, or any account you’ll actually use for a long time, because these addresses are public and generally get deleted within a few hours — leaving you with nothing if you ever need to recover the account.

Frequently Asked Questions