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."
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.
what Mailinator has been providing for years.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
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/
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
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.
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RumorsDaily
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.
A fellow teaching himself Seam has come up with a clever Web app called 10 Minute Mail
Their slogan... "JBoss Seam: For when you need more seam in your web experience."
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
This service shows how effectively promoting your service can really make a difference. While Mailinator has been around for a long time, somehow this 10minutemail has managed to get lots of exposure. I wonder did they really get all these mentions around the net just organically, or was there heavy promotion involved? If the success came organically, perhaps it's because 10minutemail is easier to understand. Just from the domain name it's easy to guess what the service is for.
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.
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
Better known as 318230.
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.
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.
there is an odd privacy from spam.la, the privacy of crowds, much as there is a privacy you get from being on cctv at every step in a crowded city of millions that you do not get from being in a village. any message sent can be read by anyone; so although everyone can read your email, because it could be sent to anybody, it is, in a different way, private.
it is very exciting that at the same time london police want microphones on street corners to complement cctv, i can set up an anonymous email address within seconds. technology does not necessarily make lives less private; it just changes the rules of the game.
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!
Change your profile picture to a picture of a penis. In my experience, your account will be deleted within 48 hours.
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.
rooooar
For $10 plus travel expenses, I'll come down to your house and yank the cord associated with your internet connection. I think that should take care of the problem fairly well. No promises on receiving the mail you do want though.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
On a site I run, we've had constant problems with saboteurs using these kind of services for creating accounts in order to spam some paint chat rooms we've set up. We've been forced to restrict access to new users, and other measures. To sum it up: It's good that e-mail addresses are easy to create, but it's bad that e-mail addresses are easy to create.