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Mailinator is a disposable e-mail address service. It accepts mail for any username and allows anyone to read it without having to create an account or enter a password. It is intended to allow people to provide an anonymous and temporary address to an untrusted person, such as a website suspected of selling addresses to spammers.
Mailinator works very simply. Anytime it receives e-mail, it checks if there is already a mailbox with that username. If there is one, it adds the new mail to the mailbox. If there is not a mailbox, a new mailbox with the new user name is automatically created, and the new e-mail is stored.
To check a mailbox, simply go to the Mailinator website and enter the e-mail name of the account you wish to check. There are no passwords and there is no way to keep others from seeing the e-mail. It is not intended to be secure so should not be used for sending sensitive information. If another person happens to use the same e-mail address that you used, their e-mail will end up in the same mailbox. Additionally e-mail cannot be deleted manually, instead it is auto-deleted after a few hours.
The advantage is that you can create any random mailbox whenever you like. If you need an e-mail address to sign up for an online website, for instance, you can give it a Mailinator e-mail address, and you will never have to worry about receiving any e-mail spam from that website in your standard mailbox provided by your ISP.
If you wish to have some amount of security, you can simply use a very hard to guess username up to 15 characters in length. For instance, a random set of characters like j25Dkelrp09s@mailinator.com would be very hard for someone else to guess. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the e-mail is not secure, and if someone does guess the name, they will see your e-mail. Also, as some services are recognizing these open e-mail addresses, more sites are blocking them from being used. So now there are alternate domains that forward mail to the appropriate mail boxes at Mailinator; These sites are:
- klassmaster.com
- fakeinformation.com
- mailinater.com
- sogetthis.com
Problems for Website Owners
Although the advantages for the user are clear, there is another problem that comes from this service. Indeed, e-mail validation to prevent malicious users from spamming websites becomes obsolete, and it becomes easy for a user with bad intentions to register multiple accounts (since most websites confirm accounts by sending an e-mail to the inputted address).
Problems for Users
E-mail from many domains fails to ever show up at Mailinator. This makes Mailinator very unreliable since the user never knows if any particular e-mail will make it through. This in turn makes the service unusable for the kinds of things people would probably use it for most, such as website registrations that send confirmation e-mail messages that must be received. E-mail inquires to the Mailinator support address listed on their contact web page are bounced as undeliverable.
External link
- Mailinator - Mailinator homepage
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"Mailinator"