The internet service spamgourmet has offered disposable email addresses since October 29, 2000, as protection against spam. The service is free, and is supported by donations and advertisements on the website.
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If a user requires an email address to give to a third party, but does not want to use a "real" account, a new "disposable" address can be constructed on the fly using this service.. Assuming the user has registered an account at the spamgourmet website (or an equivalent service provider), emails sent to the disposable address will be automatically forwarded to the forwarding address in the user's account. Each disposable address automatically expires (stops forwarding messages) after several messages are sent to it.
The user can set the default expiration count for each new disposable address to any number up to 20, and can restart the expiration count at any time. When an address expires, messages sent to it are discarded rather than forwarded, and the sender receives no indication that the message was unsuccessful.
After the initial account registration, users do not need to revisit the website (unless they choose to use "advanced" features or change their forwarding address). They can use the service merely by giving out new addresses when third parties ask for an email address. (The service will automatically create the new address when the third party, or anyone else, first sends email to it.) Each user can give out as many disposable addresses as desired.
Each user can maintain a whitelist of "trusted" senders (or domains), and for each disposable address the user may whitelist a single "exclusive" sender (or domain or regular expression match pattern). Messages from whitelisted sources do not decrement the expiration count and are always forwarded (unless the user deletes the forwarding address from the account).
To prevent third parties from arbitrarily creating new addresses that will forward to the user, the service allows users to configure particular patterns that a valid address must contain. (See "Watchwords" below.) Regular expression matching is used for this function.
Another feature of the service allows users to reply to received messages without revealing their true email addresses.
Spamgourmet addresses are generally specified as follows:
[ prefix .]word.[ numberOfMessages | expireDate .]userName@spamgourmet.com
Typical applications for such addresses are forums, software registrations, newsletters and the like. Issues may arise in the situations where spamgourmet ignores email at expiration of the address without comment. Also, the service should not be used for important correspondence. The lack of errors sent back to senders for undelivered messages is a significant departure from what is normally expected of the email infrastructure.
Since the service has over time achieved some notoriety, spamgourmet addresses are not accepted by some Internet services, normally those which finance themselves by the sales of email addresses. In addition numerous Internet forums with registration obligations prevent the use of spamgourmet addresses, in order to prevent the registration of fake accounts. As with other disposable email services, spamgourmet provides alternative domains for use by its users, some published, and others unpublished.
Facebook does not accept spamgourmet addresses and also doesn't allow linking to the spamgourmet website. Spamgourmet did have a Facebook page at one time, however it was removed by spamgourmet due to concerns over Facebook's use of user's private information, rejection of spamgourment's adresses and not allowing linking to the spamgourmet sites.
The software from spamgourmet is open source and interested users may obtain the source code on request. It is also available on SourceForge. While the code is available in its most current state from the SVN repository, the spamgourmet team has not made a formal release of the code since 2007.