Disposable Email Address Services
After searching for some time for a relevant website that offers the information you are looking for, you are prompted with a "please login to view the information" notification.
The information is only accessible to users who have an account on the site. Since you only need to access that one page and never use the site again, you may not want to use your real email address to sign up for the site, as you do not really know if the site will sell your address to the highest bidder.
Still, you need the information and don't want to go back to the search engine to try and find the information on another site that does not require registration.
Rest assured, there is a way you can get the information from the site that requires registration (and a validation through email) without using one of your precious email addresses.
The concept is known as "disposable email" or one use email addresses. You have to register at the site, but use a email address from a disposable email service (that looks like "[email protected]) . The validation email is send to the disposable email address, you read it there, click on the validation link and your account is active, you can sign in, and access the contents only available to members of the site.
Let me give you one word of advice, you should not be using a disposable email service if you want to use your account for personal use, e.g. signing up in a forum.
Since email addresses are publicly accessible on most disposable email services, anyone can theoretically use that email address.
If another forum member finds out about it, it could be used to resend or reset the account password of the account.
You should make sure that you hide the email address from anyone except maybe administrators or signup with a protected address in this case. Note that some trash mail services offer options to use email addresses exclusively. This is usually achieved by signing up.
I compiled a list of disposable email services, some may be banned at the site you want to register but normally a few are working without problems.
No registration:
- greensloth.com - deleted after 4 hours
- jetable.org - forwards to real email address
- mailinator.com - deleted after a few hours
- spam.la - all new email readable to everyone
- spamday.com - account exists for 24 hours, after that its deleted.
- tempinbox.com -
Registration required:
- e4ward.com - forwards email to your real account.
- gishpuppy.com - forwards email to your real account.
- mailmoat.com
- mailnull.com - forwards email to your real account
- sneakemail.com - forwards email to your real account
- spamgourmet.com - forwards email to your real account
- spammotel.com - forwards email to your real account
- willhackforfood.biz
Update:
We have published an update to this original list in 2012. Check out our list of temporary email providers that you can make use of.
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You’ve forgotten Yahooo addressgard
there’s also pookmail.com, which is quite similar to mailinator
I had troubles connection to pookmail.com, therefor i decided to exclude it from the list. Its working again as of now :)
Have you got an url for yahoo adressgard ?
there is also http://www.bugmenot.com/ so you don’t even have to register somewhere
http://www.mytrashmail.com/
is another freebee
thanks matty you are right, thats a good service, actually the one I use most :)
bugmenot.com is also a great site, I did not mention it because I was restricting the article to email services. but thanks for mentioning it
Your forgot http://www.xents.com/
URLs and Email (Throw away as they call it)
ok i found out about yahoo, karwin at digg.com wrote about it:
Yahoo has had the same type of service for about a year now. You have your normal yahoo email address then you create dispossible addresses that will be forwarded to your normal email address and flagged as the dispossible. Then when you start getting spam on that address, you just delete it and create a new one. I use this all the time.
I think thats a good concept, one that should be adopted by other email service providers.
have you seen http://www.bugmenot.com/ its a way arround the compulsary registration
I use dodgeit.com – easy, no sign up… saved my inbox many-a-times
http://www.spambob.com no register
for those who wonder, here is the link to yahoo adressguard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools?tool=3
also http://www.mytrashmail.com (free, no registration)
“Let me give you one word of advice, you should not be using a disposable email service if you want to use your account for personal use, e.g. signing up in a forum.”
This is not correct in so far as it pertains to the “forwards to personal mail account” services. I don’t see why you would want to use any of the sub-par public mailbox services. I’ve been using Sneakemail for three years and before that I used Spammotel. They’ve served me perfectly. I don’t see why you would want to go with a public mailbox system.
I use http://www.mailshell.com
Tempinbox.com seems to work the best b/c it allows you to receive something,
but have full control over deletion.
It also has spanish, italian, japanese, korean, chinese, french, german,
croation, polish, and finnish versions.
i use dodgeit.com
There’s a review of “Top 10” disposable email address services at About.com: http://email.about.com/cs/dispaddrrevs/tp/disposable.htm
(Disclaimer: I use and run Emailias.com)
“Everyone is able to read emails that are sent to the email address you specified”
explain please.
Pidcon its fairly easy to explain. Everyone is able to check if there is mail for the account name you specified. Lets say you use [email protected]
Everyone would also be able to check this, you have no pass, remember ? All you do to check is enter pidcon and you see all mail for pidcon.
But, Martin, say I were to use spamgourmet.com. Their site requires both a username and password to access an account, so [email protected] would send email to my spamgourmet account which would forward to my, say, gmail account. How could anyone easily intercept the email?
Another article on this subject from earlier this year.
http://neesh.org/2005/07/11/a-guide-to-throwaway-email-addresses/
You left out Mailzilla which allows you to map your decoys to one or more real email addresses.
GreenSloth.com should be on top just for the weird green sloth picture on their main page. Its undoubtedly the coolest looking disposable email site out there. The service is basically the same but what I like is it deletes it within 4 hours and you have an option to delete it even earlier!
Agreed. http://www.GreenSloth.com looks better
Greensloth is tooo sloooww. http://www.MailEater.com is much better and slicker IMHO.
http://www.shortmail.net emails are deleted after 3 days and also provides an email forwarding service as well that has expiration. RSS, Delete, Reply are all features and the service is very fast and clean.
I find MailEater.com to be the best by far.
I use three services to protect my e-mail from spams.
1. gmail plus addressing
2. spamgourmet
3. spambob
You can check it out:
http://www.4warding.com – need signup
http://www.walala.org – no need of sign up
They are the best so far.
I think http://ipoo.org/mail/ is better. It’s simpler, but faster and it’s never down…
Now i feel like a complete n00b, as i had never heard about disposable email addresses.
Good tip!
Maybe if we got rid of disposable email address, then we would not get so much same.
ipoo.org seems to be out of business. It’s a shame, I liked it because the name was funny.
The new one http://www.spamcero.com is quite good too. No Sign ups, no wait, no software, no buy…100% free
I recently found DeadAddress.com – http://www.deadaddress.com – and have been using them for my temp needs. No registration required and completely anonymous. Simple, fast and my e-mail gets to me immediately which does not happen with some of the other services I’ve tried.
You forgot to mention http://www.mailzilla.org with no signup
Ever heard of litedrop?? No signup, rss feeds, easy access, very nice clean and fast! http://www.litedrop.com :D
Anyway I just use this if some website want me to register just to get information from their website lol :P and yeah, litedrop can reply too.
http://www.soodonims.com
user defined expiry dates and quantities.
It requires your protected address and the one you wantto use as alias. Thats about it.
Good service. Effective
Thanks Ben. Tried http://www.Soodonims.com and I agree. Great system… that is, it works as advertised and easy to use.
I set up a clean hotmail account, and have been using that as my main inbox and using soodonims to forward to it.
I NEVER NEVER give out my hotmail account to anyone, just the disposable one.
Just tried soodonims. Nice.
there is new one http://odaymail.com it’s 24 hours email, registration not required
http://www.yopmail.com is the best in my opinion . it is free, reliable and multilingual service.
I agree with above comments.
http://www.yopmail.com is just great and the easiest to use. It is the most reliable service too
I have been using mailnator and other leading services for a while. They have downtimes, and unlike yopmail delete the mails in few hours. But yopmail keeps the messages for 5 days.
YOPmail stands out is being the most neat, quick, and user-friendly disaposable service around. Have used it for sometime now , it has never disappointed me. There si no registration required, and it can be used on the fly.
It has some pretty creative options like widgets, and RSS feeds. furthermore, it is possible to switch between html and text view and to display all email headers.
Also, one can choose his own username while composing a mail. There are a few domain names a user can choose from. Email aliases, and random email generator is also available.
Serves all my purpose conveniently ;)
hey you all. you should check http://www.tempymail.com. I’m using it at work and it’s great. no registration & no login! just use it as is.
I saw your blog while searching Google. Very interesing article I must say. I will now share it with my facebook friends.
To add to the list try http://www.expiremail.com its a free, anonymous 15 minute disposable email account service. It comes complete with the ability to send & receive emails with attachments upto 2MBs in size as well as the ability to reply and forward emails. Other features include a resetable timer, randomly generated email address and no limit on the amount of accounts you can create. No registration required. Try it, you’ll like it.
http://www.whyspam.me gives free disposable email addresses that never expire and forward mail to your inbox. They use the disposable email addresses to track the websites that spam and evangelize the websites that don’t.
you can also use http://www.privy-mail.com for your disposable temporary email addresses
http://www.postacin.com is the best. I love to use it.