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.

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.

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.

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.

Disposable email addresses can be created at a wide variety of services. Yopmail is one of the newer services. The disposable email address service does not require a signup and provides access to any email address in the form @yopmail.com.

A user who wants to signup for a service that requires an email address – maybe for verification – can select any desired username for the yopmail.com domain, for example ghacks@yopmail.com. The email account can then be checked by the user and anyone else who is choosing or guessing the username.

Emails that are listed in the email account can be read and deleted. There is no way of answering an email using the disposable email address service. Mails will stay for a period of five days in the account unless they are deleted in that time by a user.

Yopmail provides a plugin for Internet Explorer, an add-on for Firefox and a widget for Opera which should please the majority of Internet users. Many other disposable email services display the emails as text messages only. Yopmail can switch to HTML emails and display the mail headers as well which is great for analyzing the contents.

Another interesting option is the ability to forward mails to another email account. That comes in handy if the email contains account specific information like usernames, passwords or security questions.

Disposable email services, also known as one-way email addresses, are a good way to avoid giving away your real email to such services. You give them an email address instead that you use once and forget about it afterwards. Temporaryinbox is one such service and someone apparently created a firefox extension for this service.

The firefox extension for temporaryinbox.com generated a random email everytime you press the random email button. Copy that email into the form and finish the signup process. To verify the email you simply enter it again and click check to check new emails for that account. The inbox will load and you can click directly on the verification link.

It would be nice if the extension would work with more than one service. Many websites ban email addresses from disposable email services.