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Easy Throw-Away Email Addresses

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bug-me-not dept.

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."

4 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds a lot like by tessaiga · · Score: 4, Insightful

    what Mailinator has been providing for years.

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    The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away ...
  2. Just buy a domain. by Ikeya · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have my own domain and I can create an unlimited number of throwaway addresses. If they behave, I keep it active. If it starts getting spam, I know which business I can't trust and I direct it to /dev/null/

    For example, if I were to register with slashdot, I could just use slashdot@mydomain.com

    I can keep it around for as short or as long as I want.

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    ---- Move SIG...For great justice!
    1. Re:Just buy a domain. by Zarel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem with that strategy is that sooner or later, companies will realize that particular feature of GMail, remove everything between the + and the @, and bam! It doesn't work any more.

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      Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
  3. Re:What's the point? by krotkruton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Here's one point. Let's assume you use one email address for all of your registration needs, including forums (and shopping if you really want to drive this point home). Over time, that email address will be linked to a variety of sites, which together can be used to identify you. Of course, depending on how you use the sites connected to the email address, there may be nothing that can be used to get your actual identity or you may have used your name on a couple which leads people to you (or you might use your credit card on a shopping site). Now you, or your identity depending on how you want to look at it, is linked to that email. This probably isn't a big deal for most people. Now let's pretend you want to sign up on an Anarchists website, which is something I wouldn't recommend in the US right now, so now that email is linked to you and linked to anarchy. That might not be something you want. That example doesn't work for you? How about signing up for a porn site that requires email but no credit card? What about a torrent site? An email address that lasts only 10-minutes should make it harder for people to link things that you do back to you.

    (Before anyone jumps down my throat, I said it "should make it harder" not impossible, and I didn't say that it makes it hard because I don't know the difficulty of doing such a thing. I just said it would be harder than using one email address for everything.)