Not all email addresses can be concealed from visitors passing by on our site. Ideally a webmaster should be reachable with a visibly attached email address so he/she can be notified of potential problems, ranging from spam to legal issues such as copyright infringement. By the time an email address is exposed on an easily accessable site, however, it is prone to being spidered by spambots and will inevitably lead to the webmaster being delighted with unsolicited pi11s, p0ker and pr0n offers. User Agent or Ip based filtering does not entirely solve the problem, because a User Agent can be easily forged so it will look like an average browser and if the spammer uses his home connection for data gathering there’s no way to tell him/her from legitimate visitors. In a situation like this, disposable email addresses that forward messages to one’s actual accounts come in pretty handy, as they can be deleted and replaced by a new one, once the spam threshold has surpassed the webmaster’s patience level.

On of these services is Spambob: Spambob comes in three flavours to satisfy one’s particular needs:

spambob.org addresses like example@spambob.org can be arbitrarily specified without registration, any mail for this address will be immediately deleted on the server, thus they are only useful for processes that do not require a confirmation.

spambob.com addresses like example@spambob.com can be arbitrarily specified without registration, too, but messages for an address are kept for at least seven days on the server. There is a query mask allowing you to review incoming messages for the account in use. Note that these addresses are not suitable for private or confidential messages as they can be viewed and fetched by anyone.

spambob.net addresses like example@spambob.net work exactly like casual forwarders: You specify the account name and an email address where your messages will be forwarded to, receive a confirmation mail to that address and once confirmed the address will be ready to go. Contrary to the previous addresses these ones do ensure privacy and can only be viewed by the actual user, so they are ideal whenever addresses have to be exposed in public but inquiries have to be kept confidential. Once an account gets flooded with spam it can be deactivated by going to the Spambob site and following the same procedure as during the registration, with the difference that “Deactivate forwarding” has to be selected as option.

There is no limit regarding the number of accounts to be created, so you can use multiple accounts for each website, pretty handsome for analysis of the spam’s origin. And the best of all, the service is entirely free. I have been using this service for quite a long time now and have been happy with it so far, because it keeps my actual email addresses safe from harvesters.

Update: It appears that some time around March the service gave up its ghost and went away to meet its maker, as since then the servers have no longer been reachable. So those who still had redirectors in use may found themselves in the inconvenient situation that all the mail that was supposed to reach the inbox is now lost in Nirvana.