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."

Vs. Mailinator

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

I was curious as to how TMM [10minutemail.com] stacked up against mailinator [mailinator.com], my anonymous email of choice; mailinator has a time-limit of several hours, and its interface is slightly more elegant.

I just use spam.la

[__aavhli5779]

There's no privacy (everyone can view everyone else's mail) but it's perfect for throwaway registrations where your only concern is reading whatever content some site has to offer.

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.

Re:How is this better than dodgeit.com?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dodgeit seems like the best, the others depend on cookies (which my Firefox empties on browser close). Thanks for the link. =)

Spamgourmet

[neosake]

I personally find Spamgourmet [spamgourmet.org] to be more interesting...

You sign up (yeah, I know, you have to trust them) and give out email addresses like
[e-mail]
where X is the number of messages (up to 20) that you want to allow for a particular word. Spamgourmet forwards X number of messages to your email, and then quietly destroys any further messages.

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:Unnescessary but nice with more options

[BenFranske]

Yep, I was going to point out that Spam Gourmet [spamgourmet.com] has been doing this for years. Granted this is a different slat where the addresses expire in some period of time instead of some number of messages but they are roughly equivalent.

Re:Spamgourmet

[gringer]

I find spamgourmet useful for other additional reasons:

1. Gives you a list of keywords that you've used previously
2. If people appear to know your system for choosing address names, you can change it
3. You can send email from one of the disposable addresses
4. You can use other domain names as well (e.g. neverbox.com)

A good service, provided that you're willing to trust giving them one of your current email addresses.
http://www.spamgourmet.com/disposableemail.pl?prin tpage=faq.html [spamgourmet.com]

Re:Unnescessary but nice with more options

[Jugalator]

Yeah, I really like SpamGourmet's twist on this problem...

It's very convenient to use your regular mail client to read your "risky" mail, but still restrict it to e.g 3 mails for account verification.

There's an extra curiosity with it as well -- it can be used to detect which sites sell your address. Set it to cap at 5 mails, and if it keeps trickling in beyond the 1-2 mails, you know exactly which company originally sold it.

Grammatical number and localizability

[tepples]

how hard is it to write a few extra lines of code that append an "s" to the word "message" only if you have MORE than one message???

This can be very hard if you want to expand your market beyond anglophone world, especially to users who speak languages that have ways of forming plurals other than something like the s-suffixation used in English. For instance, some nouns in English, German, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sindarin use what has been called an infix [wikipedia.org] or a simulfix [wikipedia.org]: goose > geese. Worse, languages may have more than two categories of grammatical number [wikipedia.org]. Categories attested in some languages other than English include nullar, dual [wikipedia.org], paucal, and distributive plural.

Gmail, + - and how to use related addy's forever.

[arete]

Mod parent up - the "+" is quite unreliable. qmail uses a "-" for the mostly-same purpose.

For those who think this strategy well-and-truly evaporates when companies realize it, think again.

Let me back up a step: There are three reasons to use such a strategy: Tracking (eg, to prevent them realizing that the same person registered at two sites when they control both) spam ( to prevent spam) and spam-tracking (to track who SENT you spam.)

The tracking requirement is only met with very unique addresses - ideally at different such services from different IPs, perhaps using TOR - or using TOR sometimes. Gmail w/ plus isn't really good enough for this if companies figure it out, but it isn't really good enough anyway, personally.

The other two requirements it IS good enough for. Even if spam companies figure out to strip back to the plus, that only gives them access to the main account. Since the main account isn't secret, simply don't use it as your "private" account - let it get filtered like all the other semi-spam. If you want some mail to have a "nospam" priority do something like "[e-mail]" where you're ADDING more/different stuff after the plus.

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 [e-mail]"!! 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 [e-mail]" 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.

Re:Other spam-fighting mail services

[$pace6host]

Finally, there's sneakemail.com, which is like mailnull, except you work with completely mangled names ([e-mail]), and it does proxy outgoing mail (so I use it when signing up for things where I may want to reply, i.e. mailing lists). At first, the sneakemail site is a complete turn-off, but the service is probably the closest to what I'd want to use.

I used sneakemail for free for years - the web interface is ugly, but I only use it for a few seconds, and you can probably do 99% of your activity from the login page (create a new address or find an existing one). I finally started paying for the service (heh, after a few years and a few hundred disposable addresses, I figured I'd try the pay features) and now I get the ability to create intelligible throwaways with a keyword. You give sneakemail a keyword (first come, first served, like logins) and all you have to do from then on is send email to <arbitrary>[e-mail] (e.g. [e-mail]), and it will create the email address on the fly when the first message is received. Free accounts have a fairly low bandwidth cap, though I suppose you could create several of them if you really wanted to. I haven't hit the cap on the pay account yet. Another cool feature I use sometimes (and it's available in the free account) is to have sneakemail forward the inbound messages to multiple addresses (like when I'm looking for an important message, and I don't know if it will come when I'm at work, where they won't let me access my home email, or at home, where I can't get to my work email).

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[Teppic_52]

That's what I do, works better if you add the aliases instead of using catch all though, then you don't get the 'Returned Mail' spam too.

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 [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:Vs. Mailinator

[moresheth]

This happened to me as well.

I ended up setting up a forward for all mail that didn't specifically have a known account. So, I just made the *@mydomain.com to go to [e-mail] at the DNS (zoneedit.com).

I haven't checked that account in a long time, so I'm not sure if it's still being used for spam reply addresses.