Don't Trust a Stranger with Your Email Address

We give out our email address to strangers all the time but we feel vaguely uncomfortable doing so.  There's often a good reason to do it (such as subscribing to a mailing list), but by giving out our email address we give someone else power over us: power to fill our inboxes with spam, power to waste our attention, power to give our email address to others without our permission.  It's uncomfortable because we know, in that moment of trust, that once we give away this power we can't get it back.  It's like giving a key to your house to a service professional who's doing a job for you.  It's a good reason to give out a key, but will the key be abused?  Will copies be made?  Will the key be used for something other than that for which it was intended?

In this article I explain how to keep the benefits of sharing your email address while maintaining the power to take it back if it is abused.

You might wonder why this is even necessary, given that the main concern about sharing an email address is spam, and that spam filters have improved a lot (indeed my own experience with Gmail's spam filter is that it's quite good).  If you have a good spam filter and don't have any problems receiving unwanted email, then you may stop reading this article now.  If you're someone who's obsessed with productivity like myself, you know that your attention is your most precious resource and that even one unwanted email is one too many.  You also prefer services that can offer concrete promises ("you will never receive another email from this sender") vs. vague intentions ("email messages that look to me like spam may be filtered out").

The solution is to make up a unique, revocable email address for each person who asks for it.  "Revocable" means that if the email address is abused, you have the power to take it back.  It's important that each address is unique so that you can tell who abused it.  My favorite method of doing this, which I've used for years, is the Sneakemail service ($2/month).  It's sneaky email, get it?  Ha.  Anyway, I'll illustrate the example below using Sneakemail.

For example, let's say one day I give out my email address to five websites.  The next day I have 100 emails advertising Viagra in my inbox.  It's a good guess that one of the five websites sold me out to a spammer, but which one?  There's no way of knowing and nothing I can do about it.

Let's say instead that I gave out a unique, revocable address to each of the five websites.  When I visited CatsAreSilly.com (not a real website), I gave it the address CatsAreSilly-mykey@sneakemail.com.  This is an email address I made up on the spot using a special format provided to me by Sneakemail.  Similarly, when I visited NYTimes.com (a real website), I gave it the address NewYorkTimes-mykey@sneakemail.com.

Even though I'm giving out new email addresses that have never existed before, Sneakemail makes sure that any emails sent to them are delivered to my inbox as usual.  This time, however, the websites have no idea what my real email address is!  I've preserved my power.

When I take a look at the 100 spam messages, I can see they came in via the CatsAreSilly-mykey@sneakemail address, showing me exactly who abused my email address.  Using Sneakemail I can disable the abused address, preventing any more spam from coming through it.  Meanwhile, emails sent to NewYorkTimes-mykey@sneakemail.com are delivered to me undisturbed.

Note that I don't bother with this process when giving out my email address to friends--I just give them my real one.  I've found that using Sneakemail to protect me from websites and Gmail's spam filter to protect me from friends (hmmm) makes me feel comfortable about giving out my email address without giving away my power.  Using this tool you too can live a virtually-spam free existence and use all of your attention to attend to the emails you care about the most.