10 Minute Mail - temporary email addresses

Filed under: Security, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

10 Minute Mail - temporary email addresses

by Jason Clarke Nov 27th 2006

One spam-fighting option I've never tried is a temporary email address. There are a number of similar services out there, but 10 Minute Mail appears to be amongst the most simple (which is a good thing). Simply visit the site and click the provided link, and you're given an email address that is valid for the next 10 minutes. Use that temporary email address to register at those pesky sites that want you to give up your email address privacy for ever and ever in exchange for testing out their service. As you receive replies to the address, such as registration links or whatever, you are able to actually interact and reply yourself using the site, but only for the given 10 minutes. If you think you're running out of time, there's a link to get an extra 10 minutes. This is useful for those sites that take their time getting your registration link to you.

My only issue with this service is that it's extremely obvious what you're doing - the email addresses it provides look like this: mail16063@10minutemail.com. It might be nice if they provided a different domain name for the email addresses they give out. Just a thought.

Overall, 10 Minute Mail works as advertised, and you can't argue with that.

Tags: 10 Minute Email, 10MinuteEmail, email address, EmailAddress, temporary email, temporary email address, TemporaryEmail, TemporaryEmailAddress

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Rob said 12:25PM on 11-27-2006

Best one I found:

tempinbox.com

Cool thing about tempinbox is that you don't even have to register or go to their site first. If you ever find yourself on a page that needs an email address, just make a prefix up right then and there like: "idiots@tempinbox.com". Then you can retrieve any mail by going to the site and entering your prefix. It's that easy.

Mike S. said 12:26PM on 11-27-2006

Use of the obvious domain is not any more of a problem then an obscure domain. You can bet that if someone's paying for email addresses and they get a bunch of temp emails, they'll demand removal of those from their bill.

If anything, better to be obvious about what you're doing, 'cause spammers spend a lot more time figuring out what's useless and refining accordingly.

Gardiner Westbound said 12:26PM on 11-27-2006

Some sites will not accept Hotmail and Yahoo email addresses. I doubt it will be long before they add 10minutemail.com to their unacceptable list.

Fabulo said 12:26PM on 11-27-2006

I have not tried 10minutemail.com but I'm a confident user of mailinator.com, which provides the same service. Obviously, the slimier web sites have blacklisted email addresses from mailinator.com, but for most purpose it works pretty well.

It's good to have another one to add to the toolbox though.

And let's not forget we can most of the time bypass the registration we're only gonna use once anyway by using bugmenot.com

kyle said 12:50PM on 11-27-2006

i use spamgourmet for my disposables. the great thing about it is if you give a company a disposable, you can go into the settings later and add them as a trusted sender if you find that they're not gonna spam you. also they use about 10 different domains so that if a website is blocking *@spamgourmet.com you can just enter *@spamcowboy.com or go through the list until you find one that works

Jake said 5:30PM on 11-27-2006

You guys posted on a service called 2Prong just about a week ago, was there really a need to bring it up again?

2Prong avoids the issue of blocking domains because they have a number of different, constantly renewing domains to go through.

Andy said 5:45PM on 11-27-2006

I'll second that for spamgourmet.com, I've been using it for a long time and it's great. I love being able to make up an email when I'm in a check out line somewhere and they ask for one. Whatever prefix you think up works automatically.

petr said 6:42PM on 11-27-2006

http://www.jetable.org/en/index
thats another great site

Dhiman Dey said 5:20PM on 12-11-2006

I,m a textile designer

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