Mailinator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mailinator is a free disposable e-mail address service created in 2003 by Paul Tyma, a software engineer at Google. 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 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.
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[edit] Description
E-mails received at Mailinator are automatically checked for patterns indicative of spam. Messages which do not pass the test are deleted immediately. Those which pass are stored on-site for online viewing. 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.) Therefore, Mailinator is not intended and should not be used for sensitive information. Users cannot delete e-mail upon reading it; instead it is auto-deleted after a few hours. Mail cannot be sent from the Mailinator website.
Emails may be viewed in unmodified "text view" mode. Mailboxes may also be accessed directly via the URL as in http://MailboxName.mailinator.com .
[edit] Potential Problems
A few websites might be blocking from sending e-mail to the domain of Mailinator or similar services; Mailinator provides alternate domains which work around this ban in most cases. In addition, a domain owner can set up his MX records to point to the server of Mailinator, in effect adding an unlimited number of domains that Mailinator will collect the mail 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 only for a few hours. As new messages arrive, the oldest 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 resent 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."
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] 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
