One-off mails with mailinator

Interesting. Someone signed up for an account at isabont with an email address @mailinator.com. It turns out Mailinator a service for exactly this purpose, to provide a one-off email address, which you can check at any time, so you can click that email verification link, but which isn’t really yours, so you won’t reveal your real email address and thus risk getting spam.

Now I’ve had my email address published since 1998 or thereabouts, so I have to fight spam with spam filters, which, it turns out, works reasonably well—there’s a false positive here and there, but I can live with that. Email, just like regular mail, is inherently unreliable.

But mailinator lets you check any email@mailinator.com address, and they’ll store the mail there for a few hours. So if you send mail to linkfromlarsblog@mailinator.com, and then go check that email later, you’ll see that it’s there (and so will anyone else). Quite nifty, I have to say. A simple, good idea. Well done.

Of course, you’re now on your own wrt the service—you won’t get reminders, notice when your account expires, all that good stuff. But you have the choice.