If you haven’t used Hotmail since the mid-90s when everyone thought GeoCities was cutting edge and everything you did on your computer was punctuated with ICQ screaming “UH OH!” at you with every new message, then I don’t blame you. After all, there are better free email clients out there (Gmail, for example) these days, and it’s not efficient to use something that isn’t…well, efficient. But Hotmail’s just rolled out a new feature that may make the email client worth a second look.

CNet reports that Hotmail is rolling out “disposable email addresses” for its users. These addresses are intended to be treated like the throwaway email accounts people tend to create when they need an address but don’t want to use their primary accounts.

People tend to use throwaway accounts for things like newsletters or contests, because those types of things tend to inspire a ton of spam, and these “disposable” accounts are designed to make that easier. You can add up to 5 new addresses to your primary account, and use them just like you would if you had created a whole brand new account. When they begin to be inundated with spam or you just don’t want them anymore, you can delete and add a new one. Eventually, Hotmail plans to boost the maximum number of disposable addresses up to 15.

So, yes, this is technically aimed at regular people that don’t like spam, but it may also be useful to folks like us, too. There are many reasons for a marketer to have more than one “throwaway” email account, and having them all conveniently in one place is a much better solution than having to make entire new accounts all the time. For example, if you are an affiliate on multiple networks, you can create an alias address for each one to keep things organized neatly – and keep all of the endless emails the networks send out of your primary account. Or, say you have a handful of WordPress blogs – you can create an account just for blogs, and use the aliases to funnel all of your blogs into one account. Many possible ways of improving the way you manage your time in a day here.

But even if you can’t think of a decent way to leverage this to your advantage for your own stuff, if this new feature catches on, then it’s important for marketers to be aware of it anyway – and that goes double for those of us that use a lot of opt in forms or a lot of email marketing. While there’s no absolute way to prevent someone from giving you junk info in an opt in, knowing the ways people get around giving you that info helps keep you aware of possible problems and may be the first step in figuring out how to work around it.