EarthLink Offers Disposable E-Mail Accounts

We've been advocating disposable e-mail for years, and EarthLink's now offering it. But ISPs should take particular note of EarthLink's interaction with its own customers, which sets standards that nobody else in the industry can match.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 28, 2006]

Last Monday, Atlanta, Ga.-based EarthLink announced that it is offering disposable e-mail addresses to its customers. ISP-Planet has been a strong advocate of this anti-spam strategy for years, ever since we reviewed Gennux's disposable e-mail product.

When Gennux released its product, we complained, "although this is a truly effective answer to spam, deploying it would require user education. Small ISPs appear to embrace 'cookie cutter' technology that will be familiar to end users instead of technology which, though effective, would be unfamiliar."

Now EarthLink is ready to do the education, other ISPs will have no excuse for not offering this product.

Proven demand
Before beginning work on the product, EarthLink did something that every ISP should do: it asked its users what they wanted. It conducted user surveys and also invited users into focus groups. Stephen Currie, EarthLink director of product management for communications applications, says that both the surveys and the focus groups were useful.

The surveys showed EarthLink which products were interesting to customers. The focus groups provided more detailed information.

"We had 20 different product ideas," Currie explains. "We fleshed them out to the point where we had mocked up screen shots so we could say, 'this is what the product would look like.' In the surveys, customers ranked the products. The focus groups provided qualitative data, real verbalized feedback like, 'it would be nice but I would like it more if it did x' or 'I link the idea but don't think you can do it.' It's always good to get the users' impression of a product so that you don't invest in a product that people might not want."

In both the focus groups and the surveys, users were interested in what EarthLink calls its anonymous e-mail product.

A word about terminology
At ISP-Planet, we prefer to refer to this product as a disposable e-mail address. The idea is that you give this e-mail out to a business, and if they sell it, and it starts getting spam, you delete it (dispose of it). It therefore protects your own e-mail, your personal e-mail, the one you've given out to all your friends (or business contacts) from spam.

Companies don't like to think of any product as "disposable" because that seems to imply that it's not useful. When we interviewed Woburn, Mass.-based Reflexion (see Reflexion Anti-Spam), the company said it preferred to call its system "non-disposable e-mail addresses."

EarthLink calls it "anonymous e-mail."

We believe users understand the value of disposable e-mail accounts or can learn the value of them. At ISP-Planet, we will continue to call them "disposable e-mail addresses."

EarthLink communicates well
EarthLink, as we mentioned earlier, is explaining the product to its subscribers. You'd think everyone would do this, but it happens far too rarely.

The company has built a flash animation showing users how to register their disposable e-mails. We think every home device should have this, as should every residential service. The only company we know of that's building such animations for devices already on the market is Enure (see Solving the Home Network Problem—Really!). More should be doing this.

EarthLink is mailing out (yes, by snail mail) a package that includes a handy reference for the pre-generated disposable e-mails, visible on slide 4 of the flash animation. It's even got adhesive backing! Stick it to the desk, and you can write down what the five pre-generated e-mail addresses are being used for. This is so obviously useful that we wonder why other companies aren't doing it; because other companies aren't doing it, it's brilliant.

What the product does
The anonymous e-mail product provides each user of EarthLink's broadband and premium dialup services (but not PeoplePC or free e-mail, but including premium e-mail only users) with five disposable e-mail addresses.

Each of the e-mail addresses is pre-generated by EarthLink. Currie says the company decided to use a word-number pair to make it easy for users to memorize. He adds that EarthLink decided to generate the addresses itself, instead of allowing users to choose the addresses, because surveys showed that although customers wanted disposable e-mail addresses, they also wanted the process to be effortless.

Reflexion also prefers to generate disposable e-mail addresses for its customers. Reflexion told us that although some disposable e-mail address systems are based on the original e-mail and chosen by users, Reflexion feared that such e-mail addresses would reveal the original e-mail, making them less useful than truly random computer generated e-mail addresses.

Users can send e-mail from their disposable e-mail addresses simply by using a drop-down menu in the webmail interface (if you're interested in more detail about how it works, see that flash animation we rave about earlier in this article).

What the product doesn't do
At present, the product is for webmail only. It does not protect POPmail, the kind of e-mail people use most.

Furthermore, whereas most other e-mail systems allow users a virtually unlimited number of disposable e-mail addresses, the EarthLink product allows only five.

We pointed out to Currie that if you hand out the same e-mail address to thirty websites, and one of them sells that e-mail address to a spammer, the disposable e-mail address isn't very useful. You can delete it, but you still need to hand out your address to the thirty websites you're using, so when you hand you the new disposable e-mail address, you'll get spammed again.

Currie pointed out that the company plans to expand the offering to 10 e-mail addresses per user in 2007, and added that if customers ask for more EarthLink will provide more addresses. He also said that the technology does not limit the number of e-mail addresses EarthLink could offer its customers.

The product is being promoted internally but is not being touted as a selling point to non-EarthLink users. Deisha Galberth, EarthLink Director of Corporate Communications, said, "since this product is only available to EarthLink subscribers, it is not included in our national print and television advertising."

How it compares
We don't know of any other major ISP offering disposable e-mail addresses. EarthLink's presentation said that Yahoo! is selling disposable e-mail addresses as part of its $19.99 per year Yahoo-Plus product, and also said that although G-Mail has the ability to use disposable e-mail addresses, there's no advertising and little customer awareness.

The latter is certainly true. We tried to create a second e-mail address for our G-Mail account, and found the experience frustrating (see sidebar).

As far as we know, EarthLink is the first to offer this project. Says Currie, "we're really excited about this product. It builds on our leadership position in protecting our users. We were the first ISP to roll out Spam Blocker, a challenge response system, and also the first to offer anti-phishing tools."

— End