Do you dread opening your email inbox for fear that a flood of bulk mail will spill out? Would you like the ability to sign up at a website without worrying that the site will spam you, or sell your address? Bulc Club exists to tame the bulk mail monster, eliminate spam, and protect your privacy. It’s easy to use, it does the job, and it’s free. What more could you ask?
Well, a little more, in truth. Unlike competing services, Bulc Club doesn’t let you reply to its forwarded emails. For simple interactions like receiving a receipt or a newsletter, that’s fine, but you can’t carry on an email conversation while masking your actual address. It also doesn’t let you protect your account using multi-factor authentication.
Totally Free Services
Bulc Club doesn’t cost anything, though you do have to sign up for an account to get full access to its capabilities. However, the site does offer a couple of services that are totally free. They don’t even require an account.
Anybody can go to Bulc Club’s website and create a one-use BulcBurner email address. You receive the burner address itself in a regular email, then give it to, say, a shop or café that wants to email you a receipt. Bulc Club forwards the receipt to your regular email and then deletes the burner address. To be fair, typing a BulcBurner address on a point-of-sale terminal could be tedious. The first one I tried yielded sixty-seven-fresh-pheasants-6021@burn.bulc.club. An unused BulcBurner expires after a week. Note, too, that to head off abuse the system limits you to one BulcBurner per email address every 12 hours.
As I’ll discuss below, Bulc Club relies on user reactions to tune its spam filtering responses. Anybody can check those user reactions online, at no charge, with no membership requirement. Just type in an email address or domain on the company’s website and find out the Member Rating. For members, Bulc Club holds back any mail with a spam rating above 50% to protect the inbox.
Getting Started With Bulc Club
While those one-off burner addresses have their uses, you need to sign up to get the most from Bulc Club. The free, simple process starts when you pick a username. As with ManyMe and numerous encrypted email services, the username must be globally unique to the service. That’s true of ordinary webmail services such as Gmail and Yahoo, too. With Bulc Club’s smaller user base you can probably get closer to the name you want, though, rather than something like BatCatcher93875.
Next, you fill in your actual email address, the one whose inbox will receive forwarded mail from your Bulc Club addresses. Enter and confirm a strong password to protect your new account and you’re ready to go.
Initially, Bulc Club doesn’t look like much. You just see an empty page that will eventually list all your disposable email addresses. The site offers a simple tour, and you’d be wise to take it, just to get the lay of the land.
Email Forwarders
Different services use different names for disposable email addresses (DEAs). Abine Blur calls them masked emails, with ManyMe they’re FlyBy addresses, and Burner Mail, not surprisingly, uses the name burner emails. Bulc Club calls its disposable email addresses email forwarders.
With Burner Mail and Abine Blur, you must launch the app to create a DEA, which isn’t always convenient. Like ManyMe, Bulc Club lets you make up an email forwarder on the fly. Just pick a name and append @username.bulc.club. Want to get your receipt at a coffee shop? How about coffeeshop@username.bulc.club! With both ManyMe and Bulc Club, the disposable address doesn’t truly exist until you receive the first message through it.
Every email your main inbox receives through an email forwarder has relay@bulcclub.com for its From address. You’d do well to add that address to your email whitelist. A banner added to the top of the message displays the sending address and domain. If your coffeeshop forwarder starts receiving mail from a shady merchandiser, you can use buttons right in the header to block the sending address or domain.
No Replies
What if you want to reply to a message that comes in through an email forwarder? That’s easy; you can’t. Yes, Abine Blur, Burner Mail, and ManyMe all let you send replies, which the recipient sees as coming from the disposable address. But with Bulc Club it’s strictly a one-way flow of information.
My contact at the company pointed out that this unidirectional message flow is suitable to most website and merchant interactions. You get your receipt from the online merchant, but don’t really need to write back. Or you receive your newsletter, with no need to reply. In addition, the one-way flow allows greater security. “In weighing the options,” he noted, “we fell back on our mission: to end spam, once and for all.”
With other similar services, you can establish contact with a merchant or individual and hold an email conversation, all while keeping your real email address hidden. Bulc Club’s strong focus on bulk mail means you don’t have this option. The service’s FAQ details a somewhat complicated workaround, one that exposes your actual personal email address to the recipient. I imagine in that situation I would just send a new email message.
Reputation-Based Spam Filtering
When you only receive bulk mail through email forwarders, you should theoretically begin to get less spam. If one of those addresses starts receiving junk mail, you know who to blame. You can just disable the forwarder, or you can take a more fine-tuned approach that I’ll describe below. But Bulc Club also does its part to minimize the spam you see.
Any time a user blocks a particular sender or domain, Bulc Club gives it a demerit. It also keeps a count of all non-problematic interactions. When demerits reach 50% of the total, it stops forwarding those emails to anybody’s inbox.
Bulc Club is nothing like a full-scale spam filter. It only manages messages that come to your inbox through email forwarders, for starters. And its filtering doesn’t require any access to message content. It’s totally based on sender reputation, as determined by other users of Bulc Club.
Fine-Tuning the Email Stream
At its simplest, Bulc Club works like this: you give merchants and websites an email forwarder address and Bulc Club forwards their responses to your actual inbox. As you’ve already seen, you can also click a button in any forwarded message to block the sender or the domain. And if enough users block a sender or domain, Bulc Club doesn’t forward associated mail. You may not feel like going into any more detail than that, but if you do, Bulc Club’s administrative console is ready for you.
All your forwarded emails remain in the console for 30 days, including ones that were identified as spam and hence not passed along to your inbox. You should review the list every now and then, to make sure no valid mail got blocked. In the event that what you consider a valid message gets tagged as spam, you can pull down a menu at the far right of the message for options. If you select Allow Address or Allow Domain, Bulc Club will forward future correspondence from this source. You can also click Send/Deliver to have it forward the existing message to your inbox.
Conversely, if you decide later that you don’t want more messages from a source that originally got forwarded, you can choose Block Address or Block Domain from that same menu.
Sometimes you may find that you need important messages from a source, perhaps bank statements, but don’t want to receive bulk add-ons such as newsletters. Bulc Club does recommend simply unsubscribing from the newsletters, but if that doesn’t work, there’s still a solution. Just block the bank’s domain overall, then allow the email address that sends the important statements.
I noted earlier that if you start getting spam through an email forwarder, you can block the forwarder completely. In that case, open the Forwarders page in the admin console and change the action from Use Rating to Block All. At this time, you can opt to automatically rate every message sent through this forwarder as spam, or just block access without offering a rating.
Here, too, fine-tuning is possible. Perhaps you still want to receive mail from the original connection, but not from any of its merchandising partners. After applying an overall block to the forwarder, go back to the History page. Find a message from the email forwarder you blocked and choose Allow Sender or Allow Domain. Now only mail from the specified source reaches your inbox; any other messages through that forwarder get blocked and optionally rated as spam.
Other Choices
I’ve mentioned a few other DEA services in passing. Besides these, some email encryption services offer a modicum of DEA management. However, they won’t replace a true DEA service like Bulc Club. StartMail lets you manage up to 10 permanent DEAs, and an unlimited number of temporary DEAs that expire within two weeks. Private-Mail offers five alternate email identities, without full DEA management. Tutanota‘s email aliases are even more limited. And all three require a paid subscription, where Bulc Club is free.
ManyMe is the service most like Bulc Club. Both are free, and both let you create disposable addresses on the fly. ManyMe’s ability to lock a FlyBy address to the current sender parallels some of Bulc Club’s fine-tuning abilities. It does permit replies from disposable addresses, unlike Bulc Club. Its biggest weakness is the lack of any way to change your account’s main email address, a task that’s easy with Bulc Club.
Burner Mail, a plug-in for Chrome and Firefox, costs $29.99 per year. Among its unusual features are the ability to direct DEAs to more than one real-world address and the option to create DEAs that are strictly handled online, never forwarded. Like Abine Blur, and unlike Bulc Club and ManyMe, Burner Mail lets you secure your account using multifactor authentication. Private-Mail, StartMail, and Tutanota also support multifactor authentication.
With Abine Blur ($39 per year) masked email addresses are just the start. You can also generate one-use masked credit card numbers, and even mask the phone number you give to online merchants. Blur serves as a fully functional (if basic) password manager, too.
Simple Email Privacy
When a website requires your email address, just create an email forwarder with Bulc Club. You’ll receive the newsletter, confirmation email, or whatever else you signed up for, but the sender doesn’t get your real-world email. If spam comes in through a forwarder you know who’s to blame, and you can block everything from that source or fine-tune just what senders are allowed in. Note, though, that since you can’t reply to forwarded emails, there’s no way to have an email conversation while protecting your real email account. And, unlike many competing products, Bulc Club offers no option to protect your account with multi-factor authentication.
Abine Blur Premium also lets you engage in email communication while masking your actual address. In addition, it lets you mask credit cards and phone numbers, and serves as a full-fledged password manager. Among the many and varied products that aim to protect your privacy, Blur remains our Editors’ Choice pick.
