Quick, Throw-Away Email Address (Mailinator)

We’ve all been there, you visit a website that requires you to sign up with a valid email address and you don’t want to give them your real one, or maybe you are just sick of setting up email accounts and want a temporary receive-only one. In some cases, BugMeNot might do the trick for quick and easy access to a website, but sometimes you would rather just sign up with a throw-away email address. Mailinator.com recognizes this dilemma and has a solution.

Mailinator allows users to receive emails sent to any @mailinator.com email address. All you have to do is sign up for a website or share your mailinator email address and all mail sent to that address can be found at youraddress.mailinator.com where ” youraddress” is the username part of the email address.

The obvious con is that all mail will be public. While this is so, you can make it near private by choosing a very original username and taking advantage of Mailinator’s  alternate inbox names. The alternate inbox name of any address can be found right above the inbox of that address. It looks something like “Alternate Address for this Inbox:  M8R-0rnf9k@mailinator.com”. If you give this email out instead of the direct address, only you will know the username of the inbox.

Another cool feature of Mailinator is the widget maker. This allows you to make a useful widget that you can embed into any website or into your iGoogle homepage.

Check out Mailinator @ www.mailinator.com