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    How to Keep Junk Email Out of Your Inbox

    Using an email address generator can help you duck all that spam

    Envelope coming out of computer with caution/stop sign icon Illustration: Rodrigo Damati

    Do you spend time every day trashing promotional emails you don’t want? Try this easy strategy to stop all that junk from cluttering your inbox.

    When online retailers offer you coupons—like 15 percent off your first purchase—for subscribing to their newsletters or signing up for their emails, it’s easy to end up with an inbox full of garbage that uses up storage space and makes it harder to see the emails you really do want to read.

    More on Digital Security

    The good news is that you can still get a promotional discount without inviting a flood of junk emails. You just need to use a temporary email address generator, such as 10MinuteMail, Temp Mail, MinuteInbox, or EmailOnDeck. At the websites for those services, they’ll provide you with a free, temporary email address and an inbox for briefly viewing any messages sent to it (typically about 10 minutes).

    For extra convenience, you may also try Firefox Relay, a temporary email management service that Firefox users can download as a browser extension. (Sign up at relay.firefox.com.) Once you download the extension, you can generate and autofill a temporary email address into any field on a web page you visit. The service will also remember the email addresses it has created for you for those sites, in case you want to reuse one in the future.

    Editor’s Note: This article also appeared in the February 2022 issue of Consumer Reports magazine.