Mailinator

Mailinator is a disposable e-mail address service created in 2003 by Paul Tyma, a software engineer at Google. It accepts mail for any e-mail address within the mailinator.com domain, and allows anyone to read it without having to create an account or enter a password. It is intended to provide users with an anonymous and temporary e-mail address to help the reduction of Inbox spam.

Description

Any time Mailinator receives an e-mail, it checks if there is already a mailbox with that username. If there is one, it adds The New e-mail to the mailbox. If there is not a mailbox, a new mailbox with the new username is automatically created, and the new e-mail is stored.

To check a mailbox, the user goes to the Mailinator website and enters the e-mail name of the account. 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 two or more people happen to use the same e-mail address, their e-mails will end up in the same mailbox. E-mail cannot be deleted manually, instead it is auto-deleted after a few hours. It is not possible to send email from a Mailinator address.

For some degree of security, a very hard to guess username May Be provided, up to 25 characters in length. For example, a random set of characters like j25Dkelrp09s@mailinator.com would be very difficult to guess. Nevertheless, the e-mail is not secure, and if someone does guess the name, they will see the 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 domains are:

• mailin8r.com
• mailinater.com
• mailinator2.com
• sogetthis.com

Problems for Users

Domains from services like Mailinator are banned from many websites for the reasons stated above. Mailinator provides alternate domains which work around this ban in many cases.

Another problem for users is that mail sent to Mailinator often disappears for unknown reasons. Before using Mailinator a user should first send it some test e-mails to determine the system's reliability for themselves.

Mailinator strips many headers from incoming e-mail. This means that users wanting to verify the e-mail sender or server may be unable to do so. And according to their FAQ "Plain text is best, html is filtered. Images, attachments, and fancy stuff are simply stripped away." Unfortunately this often results in incomplete or garbled messages.

See also

• Disposable e-mail address
• Spamgourmet

External links

• Mailinator - Mailinator homepage
• Dandikmail
• Paul Tyma's blog - Description of the Mailinator architecture by its founder, Paul Tyma
• New York Times Technology - Review of Mailinator