Apple has filed a patent for “disposable email address generation and mapping to a regular email account,” reports Apple Insider.
It’s a cure for spam, the unwanted ransom emails we all get.
Spam has been out of control for years. It’s not just marketing companies that acquire huge lists of email addresses. At times, 88% of all email traffic has been spam, mostly to use malware and bots.
Apple’s system would fight junk email at the server level, allowing you to teach the server some cool anti-spam tricks.
For example, your main first-name-last-name email address could be kept safe under Apple’s system by generating a disposable email address and giving that out instead of your main email. The disposable address is mapped to your main account, so emails sent to it would appear in your main account without any extra steps. Any replies you send would show up as having come from the disposable account.
Want more disposable addresses? Want to delete an old one if it becomes unusable? Apple’s system would allow for that as well.
People have often used disposable accounts as a means of fighting spam, but Apple’s system would enable you to continue checking a single inbox for all your communication.
Source: Business Insider AU
I don’t get how this is a brilliant cure when my web service / email provider has allowed me to do this for years.
With my web service provider, I can set up an email account with an asterisk as the username – for example… *(at)mycurrentdomain.com. My service provider calls this a “catch all” email account. I can either choose to set up this email account as it’s own email box or I can forward any incoming emails to any of my other ‘normal’ email addresses. This “catch all” email will corral ANY email sent to “mycurrentdomain.com” which doesn’t have an already used email address. From that point forward, I can make up any email address as I see fit and use it immediately without having to set up anything else. I can, say, sign up for something on the internet and use the email address of “myjunkmail(at)mycurrentdomain.com”. The email will come back to my provider who will send it to the separate email box or forward it to my normal email as I have dictated. I choose to have it sent to the “catch all” email box so it doesn’t clog up my normal email address box. I respond to the email as I need to in order to validate my sign up and after that, I ignore anything else in that mail box. As a mater of fact. I have a rule set up to automatically delete anything in that email box older than 7 days.
Problem solved.
Actually. it’s kinda fun because I can use unique email addresses on the fly based upon what I’m signing up for which then allows me to see who is selling or trading my email addresses. For example, If I’m filling out a sign up form for something from wxyz company, I can use the email address of wxyzspam(at)mycurrentemailaddress.com and any incoming emails which I later receive from any other company but addressed to wxyz(at)mycurrentemailaddress.com I will know had originated from my application to wxyz company.
I first tried this out 2 years ago, by using a ‘dummy’ email when I completed an on-line form. From filling out that one form I subsequently received almost 600 emails since from a whole slew of different companies. So, I don’t get how this is really a big deal for Apple… or is it yet another case of Apple “borrowing” again?