How spamgourmet works

If you give your email address to everyone, you are bound to receive spam emails, and you won't know where they came from. Wouldn't it be convenient to give a different email address to every business or web site, while getting all your email as before? Wouldn't it be easiest to assume the address will be given to spammers, and have it work as a spam blocker by shutting off automatically unless you decide otherwise?

That's exactly what spamgourmet offers! There is nothing to install on your computer, and once you're set up, it's likely you won't ever have to come back here. This is what makes spamgourmet one of the most convenient and effective anti-spam tools available.

Protect yourself from spam in three easy steps:

1. If you haven't done it yet, create a spamgourmet account. Enter your user name and the email address you want to be protected. You will be asked to identify the word in a picture and pick a password.

2. Spamgourmet will forward to this address all the emails sent to your spamgourmet addresses -- that way you don't have to tell anyone else what it is -- this is why it's called the protected address. Of course, this protected address must exist. That's why you have to confirm it. You'll receive an email asking you to confirm.

3. After you have confirmed your protected address, you can give out self-destructing email addresses whenever you want. The spamgourmet addresses are like:

someword.x.user@spamgourmet.com

where someword is a word you have never used before, x (optional) is the number of email messages you want to receive at this address (up to 20, and the number 3 will be used if you leave it out), and user is your username.

For example, if your user name is "spamcowboy", and BigCorp wants you to give them your email address (on the web, on the phone, at a store - it doesn't matter), instead of giving them your protected address, give them this one:

frombigcorp.3.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
(and frombigcorp.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com will work the same way)

This spamgourmet email address will be created here the first time BigCorp uses it (you don't have to do anything to create it), and you'll receive at most 3 messages, forwarded to your protected address. The rest will be indelicately consumed.

If you want more options, choose the "advanced mode" tab above.

By the way, we *never* send email with attachments -- if you get one that appears to be from us, don't open it! It's probably a virus