Thanks Josh for your swift reply of 9 months ago that I never acknowledged.
I'm now getting the confirmation email.
I don't know all of what went wrong, but some.
The email that I had chosen was with pobox.com, which is itself a forwarding service. Now, pobox.com is a great service that I've used for years. However, it seems to not want to work with spamgourmet. I guess that's understandable....
At any rate, this week I decided to try again to change the protected email, to something other than pobox.com, and lo, this time it took, and the confirmation message arrived.
I noticed this time (can't remember if this was true previously) that on one attempt to change the email, the "save" button was grayed out or dead, making it impossible to put a different address in - and this was possibly due to having javascript disabled in the browser (?) because when I turned javascript on, all was well and I could enter the email and the confirmation message did arrive. But maybe javascript is not a factor because when I test this now in hindsight, having javascript off is NOT an impediment. I think it is all these factors together that made for confusion. If previously, the save button was dead [for a reason I still don't know] AND at other tries it wasn't dead and the email took BUT I still didn't receive the confirmation message because of pobox.com - then between those different issues I believed I was stuck, when I really wasn't.
Wish I remembered exactly how this all went down, which is crucial to troubleshooting, I know...
Anyway all is hunky dory now. Back to zapping spam...
Sure, I could have started a new account, but there were changes I wished to make in my existing disposables, and now I can do that.