Disposable Email Address - Advantages Over Traditional Email

Advantages Over Traditional Email

Ideally, owners share a DEA once with each contact/entity. Thus, if the DEA should ever change, only one entity needs to be updated. By comparison, the traditional practice of giving the same email address to multiple recipients means that if that address subsequently changes, many legitimate recipients will need to receive notification of the change and to update their records – a potentially tedious process.

Additionally, because access has been narrowed down to one contact, that entity then becomes the most likely point of compromise for any spam that account receives (see "filtering" below for exceptions). This allows users to determine firsthand the trustworthiness of the people they share their DEAs with. "Safe" DEAs that have not been abused can be forwarded to a real email account, while messages sent to "compromised" DEAs can be routed to a special folder, sent to the trash, held for spam filtering, or returned undeliverable if the DEA is deleted outright.

Further, because DEAs serve as a layer of indirection between the sender and recipient, if the DEA user's actual email address changes, for instance moving from a university address to a local ISP, then the user need only update the DEA service provider of the change, and all outstanding DEAs will continue to function without updating.