Activities Hobbies How to Choose the Right Email Address to Enter Sweepstakes Stop Using Your Primary Email Account for Sweepstakes Entry! Print Hobbies Contests Tips and Tricks Basics Dream Vacations Win Money Win Electronics Home and Garden Lotteries Win Vehicles Jewelry and Clothing Types of Contests Creative Contests Scams Couponing Freebies Frugal Living Fine Arts & Crafts Astrology Card Games & Gambling Cars & Motorcycles Playing Music Learn More By Sandra Grauschopf Sandra Grauschopf Writer University of Maryland Sandra Grauschopf has been working in the contests industry since 2002. She is a passionate sweeper, with tens of thousands of dollars worth of prize wins to her name, and she has been sharing advice about how to be a winner for over a decade. Learn about our Editorial Process Updated on 10/30/22 If you're new to entering sweepstakes, there's a good chance that you're making things harder on yourself with the email address that you are using on the entry forms. Read on to find out why, and how easy it is to change! Most sweepstakes ask you for your email address when you enter — and you want to be able to get the emails they might send you. Many companies notify their winners by email or offer you the opportunity to be informed when a new giveaway starts. Plus, expanding their newsletter list is one of the reasons why companies offer giveaways. But you don't want to enter using your everyday email — the one where you get emails from your friends, relatives and other important contacts. Instead, you'll want to set up a legitimate email address that you use for sweepstakes forms and nothing else. Here are five good reasons why: You'll Keep Your Main Email Address Manageable Using a sweepstakes email can help you tell the difference between wins and spam. Image (c) Tim Robberts / Getty Images Even if you take steps to reduce spam from sweepstakes, your entries will come with a certain amount of extra email. Entry confirmations, newsletters, win notifications, and the occasional sneaky spam mail all add up over time. Using a dedicated email for sweepstakes entry will help you keep your main email address uncluttered so that you don't miss important emails from friends, family, or work contacts. You Can Handle Emails From Your Dedicated Sweepstakes Address Differently You Can Inspect the Emails You Get at a Dedicated Address More Carefully. Philippe TURPIN / Getty Images Having a dedicated email address for sweepstakes entry lets you treat emails that come to that address differently. For example, you can turn off spam filters for your dedicated sweepstakes email. Spam filters can prevent you from winning prizes because they often block emails that contain words like "free," "win," and "prize." You can see how that would make finding email prize notifications difficult! You can also unsubscribe from unwanted email in your sweepstakes email account without worrying about notifying spammers that they have reached an active email address. Why? Because most of the mail in that account comes from legitimate companies, not from spammers. When you unsubscribe, legitimate companies really take your address off their lists. You'll Reduce the Chances of Overlooking Win Notifications Seeing a Win Notification Too Late Is So Frustrating!. Hero Images / Getty Images Finding out that you won a prize but it's too late to claim it is an awful feeling. Receiving your prize notifications at a dedicated email address makes it easier to find those win notices before it's too late. When mail comes to your sweepstakes email address, you know that there's a legitimate chance that it contains a win notification. You can check each mail carefully to make sure you don't miss a win. It also saves time to know that you don't have to scrutinize the mail in your regular email address so closely. It's unlikely that a win notice will arrive there. Tip Many Facebook win notifications will arrive at whatever email address you used to sign up for Facebook. If that's your main email address, be sure to keep an eye out for Facebook win notifications there. You'll Catch Sweepstakes Scams More Easily Having a Dedicated Email Address for Sweepstakes Can Protect You from Scams. Peter Dazeley / Getty Images Many sweepstakes scams try to convince people that they have won prizes in order to con them out of money. But having a dedicated sweepstakes email can help protect you. How? Whenever you receive something that looks like a win notification at your regular email address, you'll know that it's likely a fake because that's not the address you use to enter sweepstakes. You can simply delete those emails. You Can Toss Your Sweepstakes Email if It Gets Cluttered Emails Getting Overwhelming? Just Switch Your Sweepstakes Address. Johnlund/TomPenpark / Getty Images Have you ever done something like entering a certain million-dollar giveaway and immediately receiving dozens upon dozens of emails? If you are not careful about opting out of newsletters, your email address can be totally flooded with junk mail as a result of one bad sweep. So what can you do? If you have a dedicated email address, it's not hard to stop using that free account and simply get another one. It's much harder to simply dispose of your regular email address. Having a separate sweepstakes email address that you can simply shut down if it gets overloaded is a real help in managing spam.