- Mailinator
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Mailinator is a free disposable e-mail address service created in 2003 by Paul Tyma. The idea is to let a user create a new e-mail address on-the-fly, whenever needed, for instance while filling a form on a web site.
Mailinator will accept mail for any e-mail address within the mailinator.com domain, and allows anyone to read it. There is no need to register for an account or authenticate via a password. It is intended to provide users with an anonymous and temporary e-mail address to help reduce Inbox spam.
Contents
Description
Arriving email with a specific recipient name "creates" accounts at Mailinator. It is not required that an account or mailbox with the recipient's name be created beforehand.
To check received mail, a user goes to the Mailinator website and enters the recipient name. There are no passwords and there is no way to keep others from seeing the e-mail, except by choosing a very-hard-to-guess username (usernames can be up to 25 characters in length) or using the "cloaked" address for that username (as explained below). Therefore, Mailinator is not intended and should not be used for sensitive information. Users can delete e-mail upon reading it or allow the system to auto-delete it after a few hours. Mail cannot be sent from the Mailinator website.
All mail sent to mailinator is automatically deleted after a few hours whether or not the user reads it.
Mailinator has introduced a "cloaking" feature in which every recipient name has a cloaked identifier starting with "M8R-" and a string of characters. Mail may be sent to either the original recipient name or the cloaked name. Mail will only go to the mailbox for the original recipient name, and the cloaked address will always have an empty mailbox. For example, the recipient name wikipedia ("wikipedia@mailinator.com") will also have the cloaked address M8R-as16dx ("M8R-as16dx@mailinator.com"). Mail sent to the cloaked address M8R-as16dx will go to the destination mailbox wikipedia, while the M8R-as16dx mailbox will always be empty. There is no way to translate the cloaked address into the destination address.
Emails may be viewed in unmodified "text view" mode. Mailboxes may also be accessed directly via the URL as in http://MailboxName.mailinator.com.
Potential problems
A few websites might block the sending of e-mail to the Mailinator domain, or services similar to it, but Mailinator provides alternate domains which work around this ban in most cases. In addition, a domain owner can set up their MX records to point to the Mailinator server, in effect adding an unlimited number of domains that Mailinator will receive messages for. This is expressly allowed by Mailinator[1].
A significant difference of Mailinator compared to regular e-mail services is that received messages are kept for only a few hours. As new messages arrive, the older messages are deleted to make room for them, resulting in messages being available for a variable amount of time.
In addition, messages may be dropped silently for a number of reasons, making it unwise to use Mailinator for e-mails that cannot be re-sent to another address.
Each mailbox also has a ten-message limit, which means that choosing a unique address is important. Presumably this is to prevent a flood of mail to a single address from forcing the Mailinator system to delete messages from other mailboxes earlier than usual.
Finally, according to the Mailinator FAQ, "Plain text is best, html is filtered. Images, attachments, and fancy stuff are simply stripped away."
See also
References
External links
- Mailinator - Mailinator homepage
- Paul Tyma's blog - Description of the Mailinator architecture by its founder, Paul Tyma
- New York Times Technology - Review of Mailinator
Categories:- Email websites
- Anti-spam
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