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."

Comments

Vs. Mailinator

[P(0)(!P(k) P(k 1))]

I was curious as to how TMM stacked up against mailinator, my anonymous email of choice; mailinator has a time-limit of several hours, and its interface is slightly more elegant.

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[BrynM]

Eventually, the domain was getting hit with nearly 1500 spam messages a day, and I shut down my mail server service.

Greylisting could clear that up in a jiffy. My server was getting a few thousand spams a day (peaked at over 2000 in an hour at one point). It was getting so that the machine was constanly churning spamassassin and not much else could get CPU. Worse: my filters/learning were getting poisoned. I installed greylisting and the problems all went away. If you aren't running your server ask your provider for it. Most server apps have a plugin or something similar for it nowadays.

What's the point?

[DoorFrame]

What's the point of having an email address that's only around for a few minutes when you could just use a single throwaway email address for all of your registration needs. It doesn't expire, but since you only use it for registrations, it doesn't matter how much spam/cruft it accumulates.

This won't stop my mom from sending me e-postcards

[el QuesoGrande]

Most of the people I know already keep a secondary address on gmail/hotmail, etc for this purpose.

This works, but things such as invites, forwards, e-cards that your friends send you with good intentions still mess things up. I had a good clean 3-year run with my last address, but lately it's just spiraled out of control.

Banned

[Dan East]

Thanks for the heads up slashdot - I've updated my forums' email ban list. It's joined the likes of mailinator.com and its alias domains (fakeinformation.com and sogetthis.com).

Dan East

Re:Vs. Mailinator BEWARE + HELP!

[andyatkinson]

BEWARE of the "+" addressing of Gmail feature. I signed up for a MySpace account (bad idea) with my email "+signup" so I could immediately send all the ensuing crap to the garbage. A month later when I went to delete my MySpace account, they informed me they would send send me an email to confirm my delete. After doing this about 10 times, I realized I was never going to get the mail and I wondered why. I DUG IN a little and guess what I found out? ....there stupid code was sending an email to "myemail signup@gmail.com"!! A white space character! So my conclusion was that when I registered, their client side string validation parsed out the "+" character and they stored my email in the database as "myemail signup@gmail.com" which of course is not valid. After about 40 million emails to MySpace explaining this I've given up on canceling my account and settled for obfuscation.

BEWARE: bonehead sites might parse out the plus sign
HELP: Anyone know any way I can get MySpace to delete my account? (I've tried changing my email address but guess what: you have to confirm it by email to your original address first!)

BAAAGGGHHH!

Craigslist...

[Evro]

I just use Craigslist. Create a fake ad looking to buy a 2007 BMW for $100, Craigslist issues you an anon redirect email address, expires after a couple of weeks. Voila.