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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[plover]

I've been using Mailinator for throw-away web page signups for years, but I use Sneakemail for the purchasing sites where I'd like to be notified about shipments, etc.

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.)

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[Khabok]

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...

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[whoever57]

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.

I also use this whenever possible. Unfortunately, many web developers think that a "+" in an email address is not valid, even if used before the "@". Or maybe they are too lazy to develop rules that apply different checks for the part before the "@" and the part after, or whatever. The unfortunate fact is that many website registration systems simply won't accept emails like "myemail+anythingelse@gmail.com".

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[spacecowboy420]

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.

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[SeaFox]

It is designed strictly for recieving email you don't want.

I know that description is correct, but it just reads really funny.

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[zollman]

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.

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[MichaelSmith]

They must use write only memory

Sounds a lot like

[tessaiga]

what Mailinator has been providing for years.

How is this better than dodgeit.com?

[hemp]

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/

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.

Re:What's the point?

[krotkruton]

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.)

pr0n

[User 956]

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."

Just buy a domain.

[Ikeya]

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.

Re:Just buy a domain.

[Ant P.]

And you don't even need a domain - GMail lets you use +slashdot@gmail for the same effect.

Re:Just buy a domain.

[Zarel]

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.

Unnescessary but nice with more options

[Kattspya]

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.

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:Banned

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go Danny Boy, chew on this. Today's domain is ajaxislame.com. Be sure to check every other day.

2Prong Mailinator 10 Minute Mail

[shawnmchorse]

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.

Re:Vs. Mailinator BEWARE + HELP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Change your profile picture to a picture of a penis. In my experience, your account will be deleted within 48 hours.

Re:Well that sucks.

[Firehed]

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.