FourZeroThree has a nice four and a half minute video on how and why you should have a burner email account. The idea has been around for a long time under the name of disposable email addresses. The idea is that you never give out your real email address to Web sites or others who may abuse it. If you’re really paranoid, you might not give it out to anyone. Instead, you have a set of proxy addresses which forward any emails sent to them to your real address.
There are a number of ways to do that. The easiest is if you have control of a mail domain and can create and delete email addresses at will. Not everyone can or wants to deal with that, of course, but there are several email proxy services that let you do the same thing. Watch the video to see some of them.
It’s a good video with some useful information but you should understand what they can and cannot do. Using a burner email address will help protect you from Facebook, Gmail, and other malefactors who want to harvest and sell your personal information but it won’t protect you from the government. If you’re dealing drugs or into other illegal activities, the government will have no problems piercing a burner email veil. Most of us, of course, don’t fall into that category and simply want to keep the snoopers at bay. A burner email won’t do the job on its own but it’s a good start.