Most of us at one time or another find ourselves being asked to give our email address in order to get some information or service and we really don’t want to give our real email address as we don’t want to subsequently get zillions of newsletters and other spam because of our one-off enquiry.

One way around this is to set up another email address, maybe a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account which we only use for such enquiries, but a really neat way I’ve stumbled across is to use

http://tempalias.com/

It is so very simple – you just type in your normal email address and it generates a temporary email address which you can safely use for any enquiries – any replies will be forwarded to your normal address without the sender knowing – and you specify the number of days or number of messages the alias account exists for.

Once you reach the limit the account ceases to exist for ever.

Easy, useful, and of course, free.