How to avoid spam when giving out your email address

This article covers specifically when you need to / have to give out an email, but you want to maintain some sort of control over the spam that you might get. Typically your situation may be:
1) You register for some service /  forum / website / free software / etc that require you to give out a valid email.
2) The thing that you register for may need to send you the email for confirmation. This means you need to give them your email which you can check.
3) You are concerned that they will email you with junk, spam, malicious email at a later date.
4) You think that they have low security and that they do not keep your email safely such that your email address could end up to some malicious entities.
5) But you still need to register with them and need to give them your email anyway.

     ..... then READ ON ........

Before describing the steps on how to give out your email, yet maintain a level of control, here is a list of things that this article is not covering:
1) your email posted somewhere on the web and was discovered by web spiders / crawlers.
2) using various software to protect against spam.


     ..... Now for the Solutions ......
Here are 3 possible solutions to give your email to an untrustworthy company or person and how to deal with it later.


1. Create an email account solely for the purpose of potential spam mail. This is the email you give out to those that you do not trust will keep your email address safe and with respect. Over time, the list of receivers of this email may be so large that it can still be hard to maintain.

2. Obtain a third party service to manage your spam mail. One such service is pckingsford. To contact them, please email them with user name "help" and the domain is "pckingsford" dot "com". This is a free service but you need to arrange for them to handle your email.
For example,
  1. You register for something with company ABC, and they need to get your email.
  2. ABC tells you that they will send you an email, which you have to reply to confirm your registration.
  3. You contact Pckingsford and explain that you need to wait for an email from ABC and click on something in that email.
  4. PCKingsford will give you and email to use. When ABC sends the email to PCKingsford, it will then click on that email on your behalf.
  5. All future emails send by ABC to your PCKingsford email will be ignored until the next time that you notify them.

3. Make use of a feature in Google Gmail that lets you create multiple virtual gmail address.
For example, if your email is me@gmail.com, then when you register with company ABC, you can give them your email as me+ABC@gmail.com. Anyone sending an email to this address will be directed to your me@gmail.com inbox. The way this trick works is that although spam and virus may be send to me@gmail.com, those email will be listed as being from me+ABC@gmail.com. You can then use Google Gmail's filter to catch these emails in the future.

To use Gmail filter,
- go to the top right corner of gmail and press Settings.
- on the horizontal bar slightly below the top, click on Filters
- on the Filters, click the link "create a new filter"
- when creating the new filter, in the To field only, type me+ABC@gmail.com. Leave the other fields blank. Click Next Step.

- Under the Choose Action section, you can decide how you want to treat the emails send to you by ABC in the future. For example, you can delete it or apply a lable to it.

- Finally click on the Create Filter. From then on, me+ABC@gmail.com will be treated depending on the action chosen above.