Sidebar: A Second E-Mail Address for Your G-Mail Account

In failing to offer disposable e-mail addresses, we feel Google is denying users a vital anti-spam strategy.

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

EarthLink euphemistically noted in its presentation to us that G-Mail offers disposable e-mails but doesn't publicize the fact. So we tried to create a second e-mail address on our e-mail address. It was astonishingly difficult to figure out what you need to do to create a disposable e-mail address in G-Mail. Here's what you do:

1. Invite yourself to open a G-Mail account.
   
   
2. Open the G-Mail account (perhaps something like "spammenot (a) gmail.com").
   
   
3. Sign out of your original e-mail account and active the new account. Make sure that the new account doesn't show your real name, because you're using the new account to keep the original account as spam-free as possible.
   
   
4. Sign out of the new account and back into the original account.
   
   
5. Under "settings", add the new account to your existing account. G-Mail sends an e-mail to the new account.
   
   
6. Log out of the original account and log into the new account and click on the e-mail. You have now authorized your original account to use the new account.
   
   
7. Log out of the new account and log back in to the original account.
   
   
8. In settings, check in with the new account. Make sure that you click on the radio button telling G-Mail to "Reply from the same address the message was sent to" because if you fail to do this, you'll respond to all e-mails with messages from your original account, making everything you've done so far useless in protecting the identity of the original account.

Because this process is so complex, we suspect few people will take advantage of G-Mail's disposable e-mail feature, and those that do so will rarely create more than one disposable e-mail account. Essentially, therefore, we believe that G-Mail has failed to offer disposable e-mails.

ISP-Planet has one more question: is it possible to delete a G-Mail account? If not, users will abandon accounts when they fill up with spam, causing unnecessary expense for Google.

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