Keep Your Email Secret

My personal email account has over 5000 emails in my inbox, and I would have an guess as to maybe 80-90% of them would be spam and a mere 47 in my 'Junk' folder. Email addresses are frequently sold on to 3rd party companies, even when sometimes the website you're signing up for states they won't pass on personal information, who sell it on again and so forth.

When I was at school, we used to sign people's emails up for, what we considered hilarious, variety of websites.

Nowadays, I receive a lot of spam of this nature...

Now, I have no idea why these companies started pursuing me or how they got my email, but an educated guess would be that somewhere among my internet activities, I have signed up for a website/newsletter and my information has been sold on.

"Your email address is a big part of your online identity. It's also a valuable source of revenue for people whose business involves supplying spammers with live addresses.
If the sites you register with aren't secure, hackers can access the database containing all the user credentials, and the email addresses are sure to be sold on.

It's also an unpleasant fact of online life that some website owners lie when they say they'll never give your email address to anyone else. This is predominantly a problem for users of adult sites. Your email address may be sold on to sites with similar themes, which then spam you as well as selling your address on to others.

When an online business folds, the owner might also decide the list of registered users is an asset worth selling."

So how can we stop this from happening?

You could simply have a separate email for when times like this are needed, as I have, but sometimes you forget and whatnot and now I have 3 email accounts with a ridiculous amount of emails in each.

The best solution I found depends on whether or not lengthy correspondence is required with whoever it was that was requesting your email. This involves signing up for a temporary email address, such as GuerillaMail which offers a 60 minute time frame, to do such business without your email account suffering.