Mailinator (no relation to the Terminator)
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.
Ari Pollak Jan 28
Then there’s also sneakemail.com, which is ever so slightly more work than this, but it’s more private and it lets you keep using the random addresses should you wish to do so, and it has greylisting.
Nat Jan 28
http://spamgourmet.com/
synesis Jan 28
There are a ton of disposable email address providers listed here – http://spamlinks.openrbl.org/filter-client-account.htm
Steve Laniel Jan 28
I confess to having not checked out those services, but I’d like to see the natural extension: an application that any of us running email servers can use, which will create throwaway email addresses and delete them a few hours later. a) This would save us the trouble of having to go look on a website for new mail, and b) it’s likely that sites requiring registration will catch on to places like Mailinator. They’re less likely to catch on to randomly-generated email addresses at any given domain.
In the meantime, my strategy is just to create a separate email address (say, latimes@laniels.org) for every service I sign on to. This is useful to help me track where the spammers are getting my email address.
Fake Email Address Jan 28
I am using always the fake email address service from http://www.myTrashMail.com . It is the same idea as Mailinator but with additional forward and delete functions.
In my case I use myTrashMail.com for all forum signups. I also check it once a while (emails stay for a week) As soon my account get too much of spam I move on to another address.
I use myTrashMail.com daily. Its even faster than a web based login at Hotmail.
You even can make a shorcut bookmark like: http://www.mytrashmail.com/myTrashMail_inbox.aspx?email=test
Kevin Jan 28
Sneakemail was the first, the rest are copycats! Trust me I know :) Be careful if you give your address away to some startup that just repackages a long existing service.
Anonymous Jan 28