Slashdot Mirror
Easy Throw-Away Email Addresses
netbuzz writes, "A fellow teaching himself Seam has come up with a clever Web app called 10 Minute Mail. It gives you a valid e-mail address — instantly — for use in registering at Web sites. Ten minutes later (more if you ask), it's gone. You can read mail and reply to it from the page where you create the throw-away address. Limited utility, yes, but easy and free."
Dodgeit.com is free and allows to you to specify any email address@dodgeit.com and read the emails that arrive.
http://www.dodgeit.com/
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Mailinator is a great and possibly better alternative to TMM. It appears that the email address TMM generates does expire in such a way that it rejects email to the address you are given after a period of time (10 minutes). With mailinator, the email address never expires, but mail that is delivered tends to be purged after a few hours. Mailinator works so well that I have found some sites don't let you use mailinator addresses in the sign up process. Luckily they have set up alternative domains that point their mail to mailinator's servers allowing you to use alternative domain names in your temporarily email address.
I know of at least two different sites which give out disposable e-mail addresses so I don't really understand why this is newsworthy.
http://www.spamgourmet.com/
You create an account and spamgourmet will bounce the mail to you. The syntax is: [word].[number of mails].[username]@spamgourmet.com. When the alloted number of e-mails has been used the mails will bounce unless you allow more through.
http://www.mailinator.com/
You just make up a string of letters and use those letters to view the account at mailinator. This is a truly disposable mail address since the inbox is open to anyone who chooses to look at the account. If the information is semiimportant you should choose a pretty random mail address.
And you don't even need a domain - GMail lets you use +slashdot@gmail for the same effect.
I have to say I like the idea of a 10 minute window. Several hours means I can't really use it to have them send me passwords, as I frequently have name collisions at Mailinator.
In the same vein, I dislike the lack of a "roll-your-own" email address that Mailinator offers. With Mailinator, I can simply type john@mailinator.com and not worry about visiting Mailinator's site first. With TMM, I have to hit their site to get the randomly generated mail40367@10minutemail.com address (and yes, they're slashdotted at the moment.)
John
I use these throwaway e-mail addresses quite a lot in testing various web applications (which often require unique e-mail addresses for each registration or whatever). A lot of people have already mentioned Mailinator, so I'll also mention 2Prong. I came across it one day when Mailinator was down for whatever reason. It has a couple of things in its favor. First, it only uses a domain for two days before moving on to a different domain for throwaway e-mail addresses. So the likelihood of you ever finding the domain blocked is essentially nil. Second, it works completely automatically. All you do is copy/paste the e-mail address, use it, and then the page auto-refreshes when it gets the confirmation e-mail or whatever it is you're looking for. Nice and clean.
You cannot send emails through mailinator, anonymous mailing isn't part of their service offering. It is designed strictly for recieving email you don't want.
Yahoo provides throwaway addresses (addressguard) to paying subscribers. They last indefinitely and provide useful delivery options. I use this feature for sites I don't trust and for usenet to make it easier to sort out their spam. The old Yahoo mail interface would color code mail sent to different addressguard adresses. This isn't yet in the new interface unfortunately.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
How about Vs. GMail? Ever heard of plus-addressing? I've been using it lately with great results.
myemail+anythingelse@gmail.com always goes straight to myemail@gmail.com, BUT with a distinct TO address. That way you know which service sold you to spammers, and you can prop up a filter to faithfully dispose of them.
Of course, like any of these services, it only works until the big baddies find out...
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Here you go Danny Boy, chew on this. Today's domain is ajaxislame.com. Be sure to check every other day.
My favorite is to just have a catchall on my domain. Then when I signup for something, I use a descriptive address plus my domain. This allows me to not only get all the mail, I know who I gave it to, and who is selling/spamming. If they start to spam, I just turn it off or dev/null all mail to that address.
ymmv
It gets worse. Recently a spammer used my domain as their From address, with a randomly generated username part.
For the three days the spam went on, I was getting upwards of 100 emails an hour, mostly bounces and out-of-office messages. Very hard to separate out the real messages.
Be careful with the catchall, and make sure you've got a separate mailbox for important stuff.
This is very true, and the trick I use to get around it is the fact that gmail treats foobar@gmail.com the same as foo.bar@gmail.com or f.o.o.b.a.r@gmail.com. For sites I don't trust completely and who insist that + isn't valid, I use a different dot pattern, and if I start getting junk, I set up a filter. Works great.