Disposable Email Services
Most people are so afraid of spam they start a secondary email account just for use on sites they don’t trust yet. This is generally a great idea. Yet signing up for an email account takes a lot of effort. Even with free services it doesn’t always free right: Gmail keeps you logged in across Google if you forget to log out, registering to Hotmail takes more work than writing an essay.
That’s why disposable email services have cropped up. Technically it’s an easy service to build, so they’ve spread like wildfire, trying their best to get as much Google ad traffic as possible. There’s a few services out there that do a good job of this simple problem.
The one I’ve been using for a few years now is Mailinator. Mailinator claims to be the first disposable email service. It has some limitations: attachments are stripped out (stopping viruses), the maximum email size is 120k and mailboxes can only hold 10 messages at once. There’s no signup or password for the service, which means anyone can read your mail. However, the mailbox’s name itself can work like a password if it’s obscure enough.
GuerrillaMail is a more simple service with similar limitations: attachments are stripped and it don’t like long messages. It also claims mails expire after 15 minutes, but the counter actually says 1 hour when it’s used. This time limit can be extended by clicking a link. The email address also has an RSS feed. I tried adding the feed to Google Reader and it works.
whspr solves the problem differently. Let’s say you want to get emails from people on a forum or on Twitter without giving out your address. How do you do that without hosting a contact form? Whspr solves this problem by giving your email account a URL where a contact form is hosted, complete with a captcha code to cut down spam. Now, this won’t help with signing up to a site that you don’t trust, but it will let you communicate with people on a public forum without revealing your address.
Since Mailinator appeared there’s been dozens, if not hundreds of these sites. Several have dropped offline, so I recommend sticking with Mailinator. Whspr seems great for those of you without the ability to host contact forms.
