While surfing the internet, you need to provide your email address to comment on an article, subscribe to a newsletter or sign up for a service. However, giving out your primary email address each time isn’t always the best idea. In such cases temporary emails comes handy.
If the website is well-known – then your email might be safe and you won’t get spam or phishing emails. But if you are trying out something new – it’s always a good idea to use an alternate email address, so that even if you get spam, it stays away from your primary inbox.
It seems the guys at Microsoft were thinking on the same lines and have come up with an innovative new feature for the Hotmail Web Mail service.
Now you can create temporary email addresses right from your Hotmail inbox. Each temporary email address or alias as they call it, would have its own inbox. This way you get to keep your primary inbox clutter free.
How To Create A Temporary Email Address In Hotmail:
The guys at Hotmail have kept the process of creating the alias email quite easy. Lets see how its done.
1) Log In to your Hotmail account and click on the settings icon on the Inbox link on the left sidebar.
Click on “Create a Hotmail alias” option.
2) Type in the email address you want to create.
In this case, I created a blog subscription email, which will allow me to keep all my Newsletter subscriptions in a different inbox.
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This “sub-email” address can be used for a specific purpose. Maybe you want to keep a separate email for your news related emails and another to keep your shopping related email. You can create a different email alias for each topic.
3) In the next step, you can confirm the Email address you just created.
You can either create a new folder to save the emails sent to this email address, or can use any existing folder.
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These email aliases are permanent, and always stay active until you decide to delete them.
Advantages Of Creating Hotmail Email Alias:
Hotmail has found a novel way to keep your primary email safe from spam and organized. Creating a separate alias can help you become more productive by focusing on various topics within a single inbox.
Currently Hotmail lets you create up to 5 alias emails for each account, which would be more than enough for most people.
Gmail provides a similar feature via the “filters” but one still needs to give out the real email address to implement the filter system.
Another really useful aspect of Hotmail email aliases is, if you find a particular alias is receiving too much spam or useless emails, you can just delete the alias and the sender would never know your real email address and the emails would stop coming. (To delete a Hotmail alias go to: Options > Account > Your Email Addresses)
Hotmail is getting better as an email service each day and if they keep adding innovative features like these, they can truly be a close competitor for Gmail.