One Time Use!

Filed under Copyright by adam | July 13, 2004 | 0 comments

Mailinator (no relation to the Terminator)

Filed under The Web by adam | July 13, 2004 | 7 comments

Need a one-time only email address to get a password for a website or register a product? Don’t want to be entered into even more spam databases? Try Mailinator. Just make up any email address @mailinator.com and go and check your mail at that address with no password. Mail gets deleted in a few hours.

This is even better than creating a one-time only email address at your own domain (if you control your own domain): less work (you don’t need to create the address first), and no accumulating load on your server.

It’s simple but clever concepts like this that continue to give me faith in the web.

Update: two readers suggest dodgeit.com and sneakemail.com for two similar “throwaway” email services. dodgeit.com is even more barebones than mailinator, and sneakemail is a more full-featured (includes greylisting).

Update 2: another comment-er suggests spamgourmet.com. When it rains, it pours.

Update 3: Hailstorms. http://spamlinks.openrbl.org/filter-client-account.htm for a list of disposable email providers.