It's getting harder, as there are only a few remaining free email provider. And if you don't login, some delete the account after 6 months, or some don't have proper spam protection in case I want to open the inbox and find a registration confirmation mail.
But whenever I have reason to believe I'm being signed up for spam on an email that will not be verified (which is the case for most "free wifi" login prompts), I usually try to find a real email of someone involved, such as sales@terrible-wifi-gateway.com
- You can easily set up rules on subdomains to send e-mails to separate folders or to discard them.
- You can find out who is selling your e-mail addresses.
- It is less trivial for spammers to abuse than plus addressing.
The only thing I wish that would go further would be to be able to flag a certain email address to be set to "not exist", so that if someone emails it, it gets bounced back as undeliverable. I set up something similar on my own server a while back using Postfix and Postgres to deal with holding the emails/undeliverable emails but it ended up being a hassle to keep up with and I am glad to pay for Fastmail to not deal with anything but getting my emails.
Additionally, one downside to the burner email services is that some companies have tracked down the popular ones and mark email addresses from those domains as invalid, meaning they really want something that isn't a burner email.
Can someone suggest more free traditional email providers (beside GMail, Outlook.com, Yahoo) that are free forever, require no phone number to register, support IMAP.
[0]: https://sudoapp.com
example.{com,net.org} explicitly don't have MX records so I know I'm not bothering anyone. I have yet to see a hotspot that actually checks.