Apple CEO Tim Cook Getty Images, Justin Sullivan Apple has filed a patent for "disposable email address generation and mapping to a regular email account," reports Apple Insider.

It's a cure for spam, the unwanted ransom emails we all get.

Spam has been out of control for years. It's not just marketing companies that acquire huge lists of email addresses. At times, 88% of all email traffic has been spam, mostly to use malware and bots.

Apple's system would fight junk email at the server level, allowing you to teach the server some cool anti-spam tricks.

For example, your main first-name-last-name email address could be kept safe under Apple's system by generating a disposable email address and giving that out instead of your main email. The disposable address is mapped to your main account, so emails sent to it would appear in your main account without any extra steps. Any replies you send would show up as having come from the disposable account.

Want more disposable addresses? Want to delete an old one if it becomes unusable? Apple's system would allow for that as well.

People have often used disposable accounts as a means of fighting spam, but Apple's system would enable you to continue checking a single inbox for all your communication.