Disposable Email Address Services March 2006

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 28, 2006
Updated • Mar 14, 2014
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It has been a long time since I published 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 want to explain briefly 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 access 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 in the comments, some to avoid that bots flood the site and some to sell your personal information.#

The last type of site is the worst of course in regards to spam, as spammers buy every email address they can get their hands on to send out spam messages.

There is a good way to avoid this: Disposable Email Address Services

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

temporary email address

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 [email protected].

After this you visit the website you want to register on and enter an email address which can be anything as long as it ends with @mytrashmail.com and follows the general structure of email (no spaces, and so on).

It's a simple concept. Once the account has been created you may receive a verification email from the website you registered with. Visit the Trashmail website in this case and enter the name of the email address that you specified during 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 may want to delete the mail to prevent that another user stumbles upon it when the same email address is checked.

Note that anyone has theoretical access to the selected email address so that they can use it for password recovery and other things that are better avoided. So, deletion of the email is one step, the selection of a hard or impossible to guess email address the other.

You should also make sure that no one (but admins) are 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 sent to the disposable email address service and deleted there after some time.

It's also a great way to remain anonymous, at least to a certain degree.

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 [email protected] and you want to register an account on a website. You may register with an email alias that looks like [email protected]. 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 receive spam you can control it by filtering all mails that are sent 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 + sign and remove all characters that follow 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. It is 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:

Update: We have published an updated disposable email provider list in 2012 and suggest you check it out as it offers up to date information about these services.

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Comments

  1. JMGG said on January 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
    Reply

    You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?

    1. BalaC said on January 19, 2012 at 9:42 am
      Reply

      I think its thunderbird

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on January 19, 2012 at 10:15 am
      Reply

      It is Mozilla Thunderbird.

  2. Salaam said on September 24, 2012 at 9:52 pm
    Reply

    Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.

  3. Claud said on December 19, 2012 at 2:08 am
    Reply

    If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.

    1. Lynda said on February 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm
      Reply

      THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!

    2. Chad said on November 20, 2018 at 4:24 pm
      Reply

      Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…

    3. Ivan X said on January 21, 2021 at 4:50 pm
      Reply

      Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.

  4. Andrew said on October 26, 2013 at 7:06 am
    Reply

    This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)

  5. Charles said on December 7, 2013 at 7:23 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.

  6. garth said on November 7, 2014 at 7:13 pm
    Reply

    You are a god – thank you!

  7. Faisal said on February 9, 2015 at 10:09 am
    Reply

    thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)

  8. Simon said on March 24, 2015 at 11:36 pm
    Reply

    Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers

  9. Olu said on April 14, 2015 at 1:35 pm
    Reply

    Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
    Thank you

  10. Coenig said on July 23, 2015 at 7:36 am
    Reply

    Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)

  11. Fali said on January 20, 2016 at 4:19 pm
    Reply

    Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.

    1. MIki said on January 10, 2019 at 11:54 am
      Reply

      I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!

  12. Christina said on January 20, 2016 at 6:14 pm
    Reply

    Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007

  13. Oz said on July 22, 2016 at 3:20 pm
    Reply

    Great tip! Thanks!

  14. Tracy said on September 1, 2016 at 4:48 pm
    Reply

    Worked for me, too – thank you!!!

  15. shawn said on September 9, 2016 at 10:25 am
    Reply

    It’s Worked for me, too
    thank you very much!

  16. Jari said on October 31, 2016 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!

  17. Michel H said on November 30, 2016 at 11:08 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much. Solved!
    Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
    Thank you again. M

  18. Ziad Bitar said on January 9, 2017 at 2:00 am
    Reply

    This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.

    Thanks.

  19. Anonymous said on February 15, 2017 at 5:24 pm
    Reply

    Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.

  20. Rochelle said on March 6, 2017 at 11:59 am
    Reply

    Thank you, this worked !!!!

  21. anom1234 said on May 20, 2018 at 11:20 pm
    Reply

    Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!

  22. JC said on October 12, 2020 at 2:14 pm
    Reply

    Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!

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