Why do I need a temporary email address?

There are a few precautions you should take to keep your email safe. Always change your password every three months, use the two-factor authentication to sign-in securely whenever you're away from your home computer and do not make your email address a generic name. These are all great rules to follow, but you should follow a fourth rule: to use a temporary email service whenever you must sign up or register your email address. By using a temporary email service, you won't just give your personal email out to every single service and form that requires it. You should protect your personal email address like you would protect your physical address.

There are three reasons why you should use a temporary email address.

To protect your email mailbox from spam.

When you use a temporary email address, your inbox won't fill up with spam. Just like junk mail plagues the average American household, spam emails plague every single email account in the world.

No one is safe from spam email. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing you can do about spam because once it shows up in your inbox, it will never stop coming. But spam in your personal email account is the result of giving everyone and everything your email address.

When you sign up for a brand new email account, you can go for months without ever receiving spam email, as long as you only use your email address for official services like banks, subscription services, contacting family and friends, and messaging others online. But once you start giving away your email address like it is going out of style, expect the spam to show up and never stop coming.

When you sign up for different apps on your smartphone or a small blog site that wants to give you a free pdf in exchange for your email, use a temporary email instead and stay as spam-free as possible.

You can send an email that isn't linked to you.

Sending anonymous emails can be fun as long as the emails you sent aren't malicious. If you ever want to send your friends and family members prank emails, you definitely can't do it from your personal email.

They will know that the prank email was from you! But when you use a temporary email service to send prank emails, they will have a hell of a time trying to figure out who in the world is sending emails about cat facts or prank gift cards that turn out to be real.

You can prevent stalkers from following you.

Whenever you sign up for a social media account, you should always use a temporary email address, and you should use a different email address for every platform. By doing this, you will not link all of your different social media accounts to each other. It will make it difficult for anyone who wants to stalk you. Also, when you make your social media account usernames, do not make them all the same name.