Expiring e-mail addresses

I'm sure you're as sick of spam as I am. Much of it comes from sites that require people to provide e-mail addresses to sign up. Those registrations result in unwanted e-mail from those sites as well as any others that your e-mail address gets passed on to.

There's a new Web site designed to solve this problem. Called 10 Minute Mail, it generates fresh e-mail addresses for people that expire after 10 minutes, or longer if the user requests that. You can use it to sign up for a service and then forget about it.

"By clicking on the link below, you will be given a temporary e-mail address. Any e-mails sent to that address will show up automatically on the Web page. You can read them, click on links, and even reply to them," the Web site says. "Why would you use this? Maybe you want to sign up for a site which requires that you provide an e-mail address to send a validation e-mail to. And maybe you don't want to give up your real e-mail address and end up on a bunch of spam lists. This is nice and disposable. And it's free."

Another site offers a different way to bypass compulsory log-in at sites that require e-mail addresses. Bug Me Not provides user names and passwords for a variety of popular Web sites, such as The New York Times and YouTube. You just provide the URL of the destination site and it serves up usable login information.