Throttle email review – secure your email address and cut out spam
There’s so much amazing information online, that subscribing to websites often goes hand-in-hand with surfing the internet.
We subscribe within minutes, and randomly give out our email address to all and sundry.
But…… STOP!
What if it got into the wrong hands?
This Throttle email review is for you!
You need to protect your email address.
Imagine how you’d feel if your email address was:
- scammed
- hacked
- blocked
- phished
- stolen for your identity
It’d be awful. Wondering how much information they know about you and what they’ll use the information for.
A stolen email address can take a long time to sort out. Meanwhile, it invades your privacy, ruins your credit rating, and prevents you from feeling in control of all your personal and financial decisions.
All because someone, somewhere has access to your email address.
That may sound far-fetched, but I’ve experienced it first-hand. In 2013, a well-known company had a data breach. I was one of the 2.9 million people who’d subscribed to its website without a secure email address. There’s no way of knowing how much information was accessed, but I received a constant stream of spam emails phishing for more information.
So, what’s the answer?
Use a Throttle email address to protect your email.
What’s a Throttle email address?
Throttle’s primary benefit is that it creates unique, random email addresses to protect your email address.
A Throttle email address is unique for each website you visit that needs an email address. Throttle does this without accessing your emails.
It sounds crazy, but it’s true. Throttle does everything it does without ever needing access to your email. It doesn’t scan your inbox, because it stops mass mailings before they even hit your inbox. Keep your email account credentials private. [source: https://throttlehq.com/].
How does Throttle protect your email address and what else can it do?
… Throttle, a service that allows you to stop giving out your email address, control who gets into your inbox, find out who sells your email address, and combine mass mailings into a single digest email. [source: http://mindsense.co/#story-section].
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For ease of use, Throttle’s browser extension automatically puts a button on all sign-up forms (for example, newsletter subscriptions, account registrations and purchase pages) and generates a unique, random Throttle email address for you.
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For an email interruption-free day and less clutter in your inbox, Throttle sends you a digest summary of all your emails, at a time convenient to you. You can choose to receive this on a daily or weekly basis (or not at all) with category specific settings.
- Throttle’s Scam Shield alerts you whenever a website sells or steals your Throttle email address.
- If there’s a fraud alert, or you decide to no longer receive certain emails, you can immediately shut that Throttle email address. Revoke access. No need to wait for the unsubscribe option. You’re in control.
Save time by using a Throttle email address instead of being spammed
This is what can happen without a Throttle email address
Throttle didn’t exist when my own email address was stolen.
I know it’s long-winded, but the steps below are exactly what Throttle’s protecting you from. Instead, I had to:
- create a new email address
- notify my existing subscriptions/applications of the change
- update my passwords
- find out how to transfer the existing emails to my new email address, and set up all categories and sub folders
- at last, I could delete my old email address
What a palava!
Use Throttle now, protect your email address and you won’t have to deal with the hassle later.
By the way, even if I’d originally used a filter or the +gmail hack, that wouldn’t be protection, as it’s just a variant of my email address.
What if you’ve already used your own email address?
If you’ve already subscribed to a website with your own email address, it’s a good idea to take a “belt and braces” approach and re-subscribe using a Throttle email address.
Unfortunately, Throttle can’t automatically do this for you. But it does do the next best thing. Its dashboard gives you access to the most common websites’ update settings, so the whole process shouldn’t take you too long.
Throttle’s also beneficial if you’re sending marketing emails
Throttle not only benefits the user, but also the people/companies who send the marketing emails and newsletters:
- automatic whitelisting – there’s no need to ask subscribers to manually whitelist your emails. It’s automatically done for Throttle users
- guaranteed deliverability – emails to Throttle email addresses are always delivered
- no spam reports – Throttle users revoke access without the need to report emails as spam
- higher conversion rates – Throttle provides email security so users are willing to more often subscribe to websites
- optimized delivery time – Throttle users receive the digest summary at their most convenient time, so your emails are more likely to be read
- full HTML5 and CSS3 support – Throttle users receive your emails with all images and formatting in tact. Nothing is stripped out
Who founded Throttle?
Alexander Obenauer and Joshua Milas are the co-founders of Mindsense, the USA software engineering company which created Throttle in early 2015. Having created and launched the very successful Mail Pilot in 2012 (ranked #1 in 90 countries across the entire app store or productivity category), they’re well prepared for the launch of Throttle.
Mindsense is a company with its customers in mind. Its goal is to improve people’s lives with “refined software solutions for complex problems” [source: http://mindsense.co/].
Start using Throttle
In 2015, Throttle’s launched its Beta phase.
The free version lets you experience Throttle’s daily digest and browser extension. It doesn’t include the Scam Shield or the ability to categorise, but allows up to 3 email revokes per month and an overall total of 15 subscriptions. That should be enough to get started.
Full access to Throttle costs $4.99 per month for unlimited subscriptions and full revoke access. It also includes the Scam Shield, the ability to categorise emails and the daily/weekly digest.
IMPORTANT – read the update below
UPDATE: as of 22 March 2016, no longer in beta, Throttle Basic and Throttle Pro have additional features:
Throttle Basic
Throttle Basic is now “free forever” and includes free access to even more features than before:
- unlimited generated email addresses
- categories
- access control
- enhanced reading list
- browser extensions
- daily digest
- daily and weekly category digests
- Scam Shield
- manual forwarding
- public and social sharing
- mobile app access (available soon)
Throttle Pro
Throttle Pro has new, advanced features at a lower monthly price ($3.99 USD):
- instant forwarding
- custom domain
- digests for multiple email accounts
- attachment and reply support via forwarding
- priority access to beta testing (eg mobile apps)
- all prior paid Throttle Basic customers will be upgraded to Throttle Pro at no extra cost (but can choose to downgrade to Throttle Basic, if required)
What’s it like using Throttle?
Throttle has gone out of its way to make the sign-up process easy. Once you’ve received an invite [EDIT: this refers to the Beta process], the welcome screen’s helpful graphics explain every step.
It’s definitely one of the best and most intuitive welcome screens/dashboard for a new product, that I’ve come across.
There’s even a “what if” section which answers queries such as what to do if the button doesn’t appear, or if you don’t recognise the email sender, or how to sign in with the Throttle address.
Emails are listed live in the Throttle dashboard and are accessible 24/7 if needed. However, it’s surprisingly nice not to receive and check emails throughout the day – they’re only sent to your inbox in the daily/weekly digest. It’s a learning curve that I’ll soon get used to!
Overall, I’m really impressed with Throttle and will definitely continue using my Throttle email addresses.
Note: this review is a general resource, not intended to be professional advice.
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