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Bloody Vikings, Create A Temporary Email Address On The Fly

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 13:23:07 +0000

It is sometimes a good idea to avoid sharing your personal email address with websites, services and contacts if you suspect spam or want to keep your privacy. Temporary email services offer one of the best ways for that, especially if the email address needs to be used only once for instance to signup to a website or service.

It usually works by visiting the website of the temporary email service to create a disposable email address there. Some services use catch-all email address which means it is possible to enter any email address on the website that requires one which removes the need to visit the website of the temporary email address service first. Yopmail comes to mind making it comfortable to the user of the service.

Bloody Vikings, a Firefox add-on, takes the concept a step further as it can be used to create a temporary email address on the fly directly from the context menu. Even better, the add-on launches the website of the disposable email service directly with the right email address entered so that the inbox can be checked instantly.

All it takes is to clicks to generate a temporary email address, add it to the form on the website and launch the inbox of the generated temporary email address at the provider’s website.

Bloody Vikings uses the temporary email provider 10minutemail exclusively which can be used without signup or other form of verification.

The Firefox add-on is compatible with all Firefox 3 and Firefox 4 releases. It can be directly installed from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

My Spambox, Create A Temporary Email Address In Firefox

Martin Brinkmann — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 13:01:39 +0000

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 a lot of services sell user information or use the information to send advertisements.

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 with a service that the user wants to use on a regular basis. Why? Think of signing up for Facebook with a temporary email service. Most services of this kind allow anyone 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.

This possibility depends largely on the type of temporary email service though. The Firefox add-on My-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. The user enters 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 the user 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 the user loses 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.

Less Spam Please, Integrates Disposable Email Services In Firefox

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:44:45 +0000

Disposable email address services provide access to temporary email addresses, that often require no registration. Those instant email addresses are used to register accounts at websites without revealing personal or work related email addresses.

Lets exemplify the signup process. The registration process remains the same, the only difference is the email address that is entered into the registration form. Yopmail for instance is a very popular service, to use a yopmail address the registrant would simply enter whatever@yopmail.com, with whatever freely selectable, like ghacks@yopmail.com, martin@yopmail.com or c93f3ff@yopmail.com.

A visit of the Yopmail website displays a single form where a previously used email address can be entered. This will load all emails that have been sent to the address, often revealing emails send to other users of the disposable email service. (side note: it is possible to delete emails, and it is suggested that this is always done after processing the information in the email).

Less Spam Please is a Firefox add-on that optimizes the process outlined above. The extension supports the three disposable email services Yopmail, Humaility and Mailinator.

A mail address prefix needs to be selected before the add-on can be used. This is mainly used to create a unique email address on every website the add-on is used to create a temporary email address.

less spam please

It is also furthermore possible to change the default disposable email provider from Yopmail to one of the other two available providers. The add-on is then ready to be used.

The extension adds two new entries to the right-click context menu. The first generates a new temporary email address on the fly and enters it into an email form, the second opens the website of the selected temporary email provider for that site.

The generated email addresses are not random, they are always the same for the same site. This means that users should take extra care to select a unique prefix. This also means that it is not possible to generate two accounts on the same site, unless the prefix is changed.

Email domains may be alternated, if the email provider supports multiple domain names, which Yopmail does for instance.

Less Spam Please can be especially helpful for users who register anonymous accounts on sites on a regular basis. Users who barely register those accounts may be better of with the manual registration approach.

Less Spam Please is compatible with Firefox 3.6 to 4.x, a download is provided at the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

Create Proxy Email Addresses With Tempalias

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:11:51 +0000

Have a service that you want to signup to but prefer not to signup with your own email address? You could use a disposable email address for that purpose if the new account does not contain sensible information.

Another option is to use a proxy email address provided by services such as Tempalias. A proxy email address basically sits between a service or recipient and the real email address. The benefit of this is that the service or recipient do not receive information about the real email address of the user.

Tempalias makes it very easy to create a proxy email address. The user needs to enter the real email address the emails are forwarded to from the proxy email and specify the days or number of received messages the email should be valid for.

Tempalias will automatically generate a random – but never used before – email address for the user that can then be used until the time or mail count runs out.

It has to be noted that the email address will never be accessible again once it runs out. That’s different from most disposable email services where email addresses are always accessible by anyone.

The developers are currently working on a bookmarklet to make it even easier to use the proxy email address service.

TrashMail.net Firefox Add-on

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:00:38 +0000

Disposable email services are a great way of hiding an email account during account signups on the Internet. Many Internet services (and some computer programs as well) require an account before the service can be used. Some of these websites send unwanted emails to the user or sell the data to other companies that will then flood the email inbox with spam. Disposable email addresses are a solution to this problem. Users who want to signup for a service use one of the freely available disposable email address services to do so. All emails that are send from that website (or from spammers that bought the email address) will land in the inbox of the disposable email service. Most services of this kind delete email addresses that have been created regularly to block incoming spam.

Thrashmail.net uses a slightly different system. The service will forward incoming emails to another email address. Many other disposable email address services offer an inbox on their website which removes the requirement of having to hand out another email address.

The life span of the email address and the number of forwards can be specified on the website. The Firefox add-on for the service adds lots of comfort to using it. The add-on can be used to create new Trashmail.net email addresses and to manage previously created email addresses.

The settings are highly configurable and contain all options that are offered on the Trashmail website including a prefix for new email accounts, the lifespan, forwards and to enable a response system that will filter incoming email messages by a captcha system.

A new context menu entry is added by the add-on that can be used to add a new disposable email address to a web form. The manager displays an overview of all email addresses that have been created by the add-on. This is one of the best ways to keep track of previously used disposable email addresses.

The Firefox add-on can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

Interesting One-Way Email Services

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:40:25 +0000

One-Way Email services, also known as disposable emails or throwaway emails are a great way to anonymize your data when signing up for websites or services. It sometimes happens that I need to access information that are located in a members only area of a forum for instance. I know that I will be visiting that forum once to retrieve the information and that I most likely will never come back.

That’s the main reason why I’m using one-way emails, to signup at websites that force you to signup before you can access information. Most disposable emails are not risk free especially if you use them to signup at a service that you do use regularly. If someone were to discover your email he would be able to access the account at the website of the disposable email service. They are free for everyone, remember ? He could request a new password for the website and hack your account for instance.

The following list contains only those one-way email services that I do use regularly for all kinds of purposes. All are free to be used and require no registration whatsoever.

Blockfilter – You can create a email @newsups.com. All incoming emails are deleted after 2 hours automatically.

Guerrilla mail – create a random email on the fly that lasts for 15 minutes. You can extend that period for additional periods.

Mailinator – probably the most popular disposable email website. Offers some alternate domain names that redirect mails to the same mailbox. Great if the original mailinator url is banned from a site.

I know that the list is a bit short but these are all that I do use regularly.

List of 20 Temporary Email Services

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 28 May 2007 11:24:19 +0000

I’m currently tweaking the new theme which takes more time than I thought. I just want to apologize for the lack of articles in the last days. Once the new theme is published I will have more time to write articles again.

I have been writing about temporary (disposable) email services before which can be used to register to certain web services without revealing your true email address. This is great if you do not want to risk that the website is selling your email address.

This is however a security risk if you do register at a service that is sending passwords to the email again if you have forgotten them. Everyone who knows the email that you have registered with could use the forgotten password request to get your password.

I have taken the liberty to paste the complete list from Sizlopedia in my blog.

Mailinator is one of the best and top rated disposable email services that gives you a temporary mailbox on the following address format e.g. something@mailinator.com
MyTrashMail is another good temporary mail service that gives you a mailbox in the address format e.g. something@trashymail.com and also gives you secure temporary mailbox if you signup
MailExpire stands out in the crowd by giving you the option to have a temporary inbox ranging from 12 hours expiry to as long as 3 months
TemporaryInbox is yet another simple and easy to use temporary email service that gives you an email address in different formats
MailEater gives you a free temporary email inbox in the format e.g. something@MailEater.com
Jetable not only allows you to set the life span of your temporary email inbox but also allows you to forward the mails in your temporary inbox to your real email address
SpamBox gives you a temporary email address in the format e.g. something@spambox.us and also allows you to set the lifespan of your inbox
GuerillaMail lets you generate a temporary email which expires in a time of 15 minutes and also tell you how to offer a temporary email service on your site.
SpamHole provides you a 2 hour long temporary email inbox at the address format e.g. something@spamhole.com
10MinuteMail generates an easy 10 minute email inbox for your temporary email needs
DontReg is one bigger, better, faster and safer temporary email inbox solution
TempoMail is one new temporary email inbox services that give you spam-free mailbox
TempEmail aims to give you a fast, anonymous yet secure temporary email inbox
PookMail is a multi-language temporary email inbox service that gives an email address in the format e.g. something@pookmail.com
SpamFree24 is a new multi-domain temporary email inbox service which is growing rapidly
KasMail requires registration, allows up to 25 aliases, can set aliases to expire after a certain amount of time.
SpamMotel requires registration, provides mail forwarding, mail can be accessed through desktop e-mail clients, can reply to e-mail from your real e-mail address using SpamMotel e-mail.
GreenSloth requires no registration, receive-only, e-mail expires automatically after a week
AnonInbox requires no registration, simple, no frills.
Spam.la is a fast disposable email service which requires no registration, no frills. You can see all spam being sent to all Spam.la accounts, or just your own.

He is missing the email service from Bugmenot.

Temporary Email from BugMeNot

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:47:29 +0000

Many sites have the requirement that you need to signup to access their content. I don’t want to talk about the positive and negative effects of forcing users to signup before they can access information on a website but I would like to point out that some websites use the signup process solely to gain a valid email address from the user which can be sold to questionable companies. A temporary email address on the other side is a way to be able to signup to those websites without revealing one of your private email addresses.

BugMeNot, the service that is mostly known for its database of usernames and passwords to various sites on the internet, is offering a temporary email address service as well. You need to use a email in the form name@bugmenot.com when you create an account on another website. BugMeNot collects the emails and keeps them for a maximum of 24 hours. Just visit the disposable email service from BugMeNot and enter the name that you have selected during account creation into the form field.

All emails that have been send to BugMeNot in the last 24 hours are then displayed. If you use a common name such as test@bugmenot.com or similar you will probably see more than one email. You should also remember that everyone is able to access the email for your account confirmation as well and is able to force the website that you signed up with to send another password.

This means that you should only use disposable email services if the service is in no way connected to you. Make also sure that you use a password that you do not use normally. So, if you only want to signup to Youtube to be able to upload some videos you could use the service. It is however no good idea to use it to signup to Amazon oder eBay.

Disposable Email Address Services March 2006

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 08:26:54 +0000

It has been a long time since I wrote the first article about Disposable Email Address Services and I think it is time to update the old article with new services and get rid of dead ones. Before I start listing several websites and services that allow you to use “one-use” email addresses I will shortly explain why everyone should have at least one service at hand all the time.

We all know websites that require you to register before you can see their content. Many are free sites that force the user to register to see the content, some do this to avoid spam on their boards and comments, some to avoid that bots flood the site and some to sell your personal information. The last type of sites are the worst of course, spammers buy millions of email addresses and send their spam to them. There is a good way to avoid this: Disposable Email Address Services.

There are two ways to avoid spam when registering somewhere on the internet. First you can use Disposable Email Address Services that allow you to check an email account that is not your own and email aliases that webmailers like gmail and yahoo mail offer. I will only post free sites that offer the first service.

The procedure itself is always the same. You go to the website of the service and take a look at the requirements of the email address. For example the service www.mytrashmail.com offers only free emails that use somename@mytrashmail.com. After this you visit the website you want to register with and enter an email address which could be anything as long as it ends with @mytrashmail.com.

It´s a simple concept. Once the account is created you recieve a verification email from the website you registered with and have to reply to it. Visit the services website, in this case www.mytrashmail.com and enter the name of the email address that you specified in the registration process. It can take 1-2 minutes before you can read the mail but it should appear sooner or later.

After that you might want to delete the mail to prevent that another user might check the same email address and find your registration information. He could go to the website and demand that the password is send out again to the email, check it then and use your account. So, delete it when possible to be on the safe side. Or use aliases that are hard to guess, something like tu834ffe.

You should also make sure that no one (but admins) is able to see your email address that you registered with. Other than that, it´s a safe method.

If they sell your email now all mail will be send to the disposable email address service and deleted there after some time.

It´s also a great way to stay relativly anonymous.

Email Aliases:

This is becoming increasingly popular. I only tested it with my gmail account but friends told me that yahoo for instance is offering a similar service. You can send emails using a service called plus addressing. This is not documented yet in the help files so I explain the basic concept. Lets say your email address is ghacks@gmail.com and you want to register at a website. You might register with an email alias that looks like ghacks+sitename@gmail.com. The verification mail will be send to your inbox and you can reply to it to activate the account.

This feature has advantages but also an disadvantage. First, if you recieve spam you can control it by filtering all mails that are send to the email alias. You can also verify that a site is selling your email to spammers if you are using unique aliases for each site you register with.

A disadvantage is that spammers only need to parse the email to check for the + and everything that follows up to the @ sign. They will then have your real email and can send you spam again.

Oh, one other service that a user posted in the comments of my last article on the subject is called bugmenot.com. They are basically a search engine for registration data for various sites. You search for the site you want to register and they probably have already some account data in their database. This of course only works if you just want to read and not participate as a unique user.

Disposable Email Services List:

6url.com
dodgeit.com
jetable.org
maileater.com
mailinator.com
shortmail.com
spam.la
spambob.com
tempinbox.com
xents.com