My Spambox, Create A Temporary Email Address In Firefox

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 30, 2010
Updated • Dec 16, 2016
Firefox, Firefox add-ons
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Temporary email services are great when it comes to protecting one's privacy on the Internet. They are especially useful during website and service sign ups, considering that you never know if a services sells user information or use the information for advertisement.

But, those disposable email addresses are not suited for all purposes. It is often not a good idea for instance to use a temporary email address for signing up at a service that you want to use on a regular basis.

Why? Think of signing up for Facebook with a temporary email service. Most services of this kind allow access to all email addresses which means that any user knowing the email address, or stumbling upon it, could access the user's Facebook account (by requesting a password reset). This possibility depends largely on the type of temporary email service though.

Note: The extension is still available, but its functionality is broken. We suggest you check out alternatives such as TrashMail for Firefox or the temporary email alternative listed in the update at the end of the original article.

The Firefox add-onMy-Spambox adds capabilities right to the browser's status bar to create a temporary email address.

It seems to use the temporary email service jetable for this. What it does is the following. You enter an email address in the first field of the configuration window. This is the email address the temporary email address gets forwarded to.

My-Spambox creates the temporary email address then and you can use it for the next twelve hours. After that the link is removed and the forwarding of email messages is no longer working.

The generated email address is automatically copied to the clipboard. There is however no history or log to access it again if needed. If you lose the temporary email address there is no way to get it back, which should not be a huge problem on the other hand considering that a new one can be created right away.

My-Spambox is a Firefox add-on for all Firefox versions from 1.5 to the latest Firefox 4 nightly builds.

Update: The extension is no longer compatible with recent versions of the Firefox browser. A working alternative is Less Spam, please which integrates eight different services into Firefox.

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My Spambox
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Comments

  1. Crodol said on October 31, 2010 at 10:31 am
    Reply

    I use
    http://www.guerrillamail.com/
    Pretty good service.

  2. Jojo said on October 30, 2010 at 9:37 pm
    Reply

    I’ve used http://www.spamex.com for years for disposable email addresses. I think I have something like 200 email addresses active right now. I use these addresses for all forum sign-ups, for shopping services and for domain registrations.

    You define a forwarding email address and all emails received are forwarded to this master email address.

    You can let the service generate an email address for you or you can create an address of your own choice.

    You can also reply to emails and add attachments. The service scrubs identifying email addresses before forwarding the reply email, so there is no exposure of your permanent email email address.

    There is a bookmarklet that I have in the FF links bar for easy access to their UI application (for managing the email addresses). You can list, create, delete and turn email addresses off/on through this UI.

    I can say that few companies sell email addresses, as I know immediately if they do. But when the few that do sell/lose them do so, I know exactly who is at fault. And it is not always the fault of the of the company when an email address gets sold/lost. Sometimes it is a partner they are working with who does the stealing or even some rouge person in access chain. I’ve had maybe 15 or so email addresses compromised over the years out of many hundreds that I have created.

    The service is reliable but support is next to non-existent.

    The cost for the basic level which allows for up to 500 disposable addresses and attachments up to 500KB is a mere US$10/year, a great bargain!

  3. Paul(us) said on October 30, 2010 at 8:34 pm
    Reply

    I am using myspambox sins version 0.36 and i have to write great Firefox add-on because it, becomes steadier with every release

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