
MyTemp.email – Temporary Disposable Email - husanu
https://mytemp.email/
======
arsenide
I use Mailinator[1] for these purposes (which has hundreds of domains to
generate emails for), and I have not been convinced to switch. After going to
this site, I have to press a button before an email is generated for me. This
doesn't optimize my use of a similar service (in fact, it is slower): I come
across some site that needs an email where I prefer not to divulge mine, and I
put in something like "signmeup@mailinator.com". I then go to Mailinator and
do email confirmation, if necessary, with this open inbox. Some sites don't
even require email confirmation to make an account, so I don't even have to
deal with Mailinator! How great!

In the case of this website, I have to open up a new tab and go here first,
note the random email name generated to me, put it in the signup box, and
maybe tab back and click a confirmation link mailed to the inbox.

Sure, it's a bit nitpicky, but I see no direct improvement made on existing
services for my particular use case. If I need a "private inbox" for a website
signup, I probably care enough to use my own personal email.

[1] [http://mailinator.com/](http://mailinator.com/)

~~~
joosters
I can also vouch for mailinator, it's a brilliant service.

Also, if you just need quick access to a site, you probably don't even need to
make an account. Just go to the 'forgot my password' page and put in
sitename@mailinator.com - someone may have previously created an account
through mailinator, you can just grab the new password in the email and sign
in :)

~~~
nirvdrum
Rampant abuse from Mailinator users is one reason we started requiring credit
cards for trials at my last startup.

~~~
Aldo_MX
Rampant abuse from companies is one reason I started using Mailinator. See the
vicious circle here?

If companies didn't use dark patterns (such as subscribing you automatically
to newsletters when you purchase something), people wouldn't need to use
disposable email addresses.

~~~
nirvdrum
Fully 100% of the Mailinator users that used our service were doing it to try
to take advantage of a generous trial system. That says nothing of those that
were trying to DoS the service. And the parent was essentially advocating for
hijacking an existing account to avoid going through legitimate channels. If
you don't want to abide by the ToS, then take the principled stand and don't
use the service. Maybe even let the company know about it.

Plus addressing and filters are free and every email provider I'm aware of has
them. If newsletters bother you that much, there are options other than a
service designed for abuse.

Doing MX lookups was annoying so we solved our problem another way. We managed
to cut out virtually all abuse without appreciably affecting conversion. It
just sucks we had to leave behind the few that legitimately wanted to trial
without a CC on file (although if they contacted us, we were happy to oblige).
And it sucks we had to spend engineering effort trying to deal with abuse,
almost all of it originating from a single, well-known provider (Mailinator)
-- not the best use of time for a bootstrapped company.

I guess the next stage in this vicious cycle is a service that gives out free
credit card numbers that can authorize but can't be charged (or maybe just a
stolen CC database).

 _edit - Clarified some points due to inadvertently submitting early._

~~~
Aldo_MX
There is a service which gives you unlimited disposable credit card numbers,
just ask your bank for it.

You can't stop abuse against a time-based trial, so why use a time-based
trial?

I don't know your business, but you should consider designing an unlimited
trial instead, if your service is good most people will eventually pay for it,
or even better, someone else will pay on behalf of them.

A prime example is Dropbox, when you purchase specific phone models you get
extra storage, the user didn't pay for that storage, but someone else did
(most likely the company who is selling the phone).

~~~
Aldo_MX
@nirvdrum: I can't reply to you directly, probably because of the downvotes,
but anyway...

My point is that when you design a trial, you should look for constraints that
are more difficult to abuse, and also more valuable for a user, and definitely
"1 month of service" is neither difficult to abuse, nor valuable for a user.

If you found a solution in requiring CC details on signup, it's OK, but that
was just a temporary cure to your illness of having a time-limited trial. It's
not the fault of mailinator, nor the fault of banks, is the fault of wanting
to have one (trial) account per person.

South Korea even takes the extreme approach of requiring social security
numbers to guarantee that every account reflects one (korean) person, yet it
is trivially easy to find stolen databases of schools and companies, and many
forums, especially gaming forums even recommend you to commit identity theft
to play an online korean game.

Not even companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. can save themselves
from complex abuse techniques like stolen CC's, generated and valid CC's,
disposable CC's, etc. You can pretty easily find news about massive DDoS
attacks generated from their clouds using these techniques.

Regardless of how much effort you have spent dealing with abuse, if you are
only playing wack-a-mole, you are just wasting your time.

I know it is easier said than done, but probably adding a proxy to do
throttling, enforce global limits to free users (ex. domain + ip per
hour/day), and stopping/reporting DoS attempts would had been a better
investment than trying to prevent users from using Mailinator.

~~~
nirvdrum
We're going in circles, so this will be my last comment on the matter. In our
experience, over an extended period of time, there was virtually no legitimate
use originating from Mailinator users. Maybe it's a fantastic service for
others. For us, it was hands down the biggest source of abuse. It would be
extremely difficult for anyone to convince me of its legitimacy in the face of
the data we saw over a prolonged period.

And it's not even that Mailinator users would sign up, try it for 30 minutes,
and then just move on. In that case, I'd just say they weren't qualified,
didn't like the service, didn't find the value prop, whatever. But that's not
what happened.

I don't really think the "you're going to get screwed, so just learn how to
get screwed" attitude is really appropriate. There have been a few armchair
theories on how we should have dealt with the issue. Suffice to say, 10
paragraphs of text here aren't going to enumerate everything we tried. And
it's not as if we made no product improvements in that period either.

Simply put: if you don't want to use the service, great. If you don't find it
valuable, that's fine too. But no one's taking the high road trying to
perennially use a service without paying for it, meanwhile calling it a
quality issue.

And none of this is abstract. We tried all sorts of technical solutions.
People just found another way to abuse. We slapped the credit card gate up and
had not a single Mailinator signup for the 2 years after that. It simply
solved the problem. Maybe someone will up the ante with fake credit cards . .
. for us, we found thousands of Mailinator users weren't willing to take that
step.

------
mraison
I wasn't aware of the bunch of services that provide temporary email
addresses. Something I've been doing with my gmail address is to put
johndoe+thenameofthesite@gmail.com instead of just johndoe@gmail.com. It's
nice that Gmail gives you such a wide range of addresses that automatically
point to your regular mailbox. It's clearly not ideal (doesn't preserve the
privacy of my normal email address), but it's super easy to do and in most
cases it allows me to filter out unwanted emails, trace which advertiser got
my email address from which service, etc. Now of course if services start
implementing the removal of the + __* part from the email address then this
doesn 't work anymore. But for now I think they don't really care.

~~~
nchelluri
I have a johndoe.public@gmail.com email address that forwards everything to
johndoe@gmail.com. I do the same trick you do, but I use
johndoe.public+sitename@gmail.com instead.

I sometimes use mailinator too.

~~~
husanu
and how easy is for spammers to remove the "+sitename" from email address?

~~~
Steuard
I'm embarrassed to say that it wasn't until I'd been using this technique for
multiple years that this occurred to me. I've kept doing it out of inertia
ever since.

I'd say "it works if you make sure that no legitimate mail will lack a +", but
some sites fail horribly when there's a + in your address. (I once got stuck
in a situation where the "new account" form on a site accepted the + version,
but their login form (based on email address) didn't.)

~~~
tricolon
I will forever be subscribed to the Bowery Presents newsletter because
Ticketmaster's unsubscribe form doesn't allow +s in email addresses.

~~~
mdaniel
It may be beyond your level of interest to try, but I've often experienced
that sites who put dumb validation rules in the browser will therefore omit
the validation on the server. Thus, you're one well crafted curl request away
from unsubscription bliss. Chrome will also give you some help in that its
network request list in the developer tools has a "copy as curl" in the right-
click menu.

------
dwyer
I've been using [http://10minutemail.com/](http://10minutemail.com/) for years
now. It's not pretty, but it works and I can't recall any of the generated
addresses ever being rejected.

~~~
vblord
I've been using 10minutemail for years. I've never hand any email address that
didn't work or was rejected.

------
ikeboy
While we're all linking to our favorite alt, don't forget blur from abine.com.
It's a browser extension that adds a "mask my email" button when you select an
email field, and forwards those emails to you. Each forwarded email has a link
at the top that allows you to turn off that address forever. Also does
password generation and other cool stuff.

------
simonswords82
What makes this different to the dozen or so other services that already
provide temporary e-mail addresses?

~~~
bmmayer1
This one has a .email domain :)

------
billyhoffman
There is a depressing theme on this thread that businesses == spammers. I am
sure that a long history of poor email use by many companies helped create
this impression, but this way too broad of a generalization.

Our startup has a "free report" where we analyze a single page and dependent
resources for ~420 front-end performance issues. We believe that this has
value. For that free report, we ask for a valid email address, so we can send
you _1_ email, from an actual person, to ask what you thought of the findings
and to offer to answer any questions. That's it. You get something, we get
something.

Now, I understand that 1st time users can't/don't know if our free report
value, so they don't want to give us something you consider valuable in
return. But using a temporary email to get peek at value from me is a dick
move.

1000 people rush to tell me: "But if you service has value then people will
come back and [blah blah blah]".

Well, you have a gut feel and I have 4 years of data. And we have had 0 temp
email providers ever want to talk with us. Clearly we provide value, because
we have a number of large customers in the retail and media spaces. What I've
learned is the type of person who uses a temp email provider doesn't see the
value that our customers do. They don't fit our customer model, so we don't
spend time or energy on them, and importantly money/resources on them. Instead
we filter the major temp email providers and display a message explaining our
email policy, and ask them to use a real email address. People can get around
it, but it raises the bar and explains our position, which is really the only
thing I can do.

Jerk companies have created an environment that is tarnishes everyone, and
that is depressing as hell.

~~~
philh
From your perspective, is there a difference between "user gives you a
temporary email address" and "user gives you their real email address and
ignores the email you send"?

~~~
billyhoffman
Yes, to me they are different. Temp email users could see my email, and ignore
it. A real email user could see the email and ignore it. While the outcome is
the same, for me it's a matter of intent.

A disposable email address feel like "I don't trust you, go away, you are not
allowed to talk to me". Great. I understand, and being selective with your
trust is good. But I'm not some random person walking up to you on the street
and saying "give me your email address". You came to me, and you are asking me
to give you something (in this case, an analysis of your website's front-end
performance issues). In return, I at least want the opportunity for my email
to rot in a place that might actually get your attention :-)

------
joshstrange
I personally do not use services like this but I'd be interested if it
provided features like Mailnesia that auto-clicks confirmation links for you.
[http://mailnesia.com/](http://mailnesia.com/)

I have never used Mailnesia but I remember reading about a service like this
(may have been this one) and I wanted to add it here in the comments for
anyone who missed it.

~~~
husanu
I will think about this feature.

------
Bedon292
Correct me if I am wrong, it appears the difference between this and other
services is that you cannot get to the inbox without the unique url.

That means random people cannot get into the email and people are unlikely to
be able to 'forgot my password' on the account you created.

I see that as a nice advantage over the other services if that is true.

------
JustGotHere
Question to web site owners: do you block these kind of domains from
registering to your websites?

~~~
sundiver
There are reasons to not block these emails and there are good reasons to
block them (but you better not admit that on HN if you do). Number 1 reason to
reject is: these users never (99.99%) become customers.

That said: [http://cleanli.st](http://cleanli.st)

An API (beta) to validate email addresses. It knows and dynamically detects
thousands of dispoable email domains (including all mailinator domains).

------
tempodox
This looks like it might scratch an itch. Only the description is so meagre
and in such a bad English, I can't make heads or tails of it.

------
Red_
I really like the design of this site, it is almost exactly like Tempmail[1].

[1] [http://tempmail.de](http://tempmail.de)

------
lightblade
I have seen form validators that actually block you from using disposable
emails.

~~~
Aldo_MX
BUT they can't catch EVERY disposable email being the most effective one to
register your own .tk domain and proxy it to a disposable mail server ;)

------
edoceo
Yet another item to add to my user verification service - which blocks these
kinds of things. I like getting my users real email address - and blocking
"high risk" accounts

------
rubyn00bie
Site wouldn't load, but here's my favorite platform for disposable emails:
mytrashmail.com

I've probably been using it for a decade now. Wonderful service.

------
nikitsaraf
I have been using [http://tempmail.de](http://tempmail.de) for a while. Its
not blocked by any websites (From the ones that I have tried registering with.
They are quite a few) And the best part is that you don't need to register an
account to use the mailbox. You just need to visit the website and would be
presented with a mailbox. You may get as many mailbox you need, by opening it
in Private Window, every time.

------
rokhayakebe
Ask HN: Would you use a Google voice for email, one email that acts as a entry
door to your other email accounts?

~~~
SquareWheel
I already have all my email accounts forwarding to my main address, and have
configured Gmail to let me send as other addresses. So while it sounds useful,
it already kind of exists.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I am suggesting ONE->TO->MANY_OR_APPROPRIATE_DEPENDING_ON_RULE

Is your current setup MANY->TO->ONE?

~~~
SquareWheel
My setup is both. All accounts filter in to my main account, but from that
main account I can send as any of those addresses. As a non-Voice user though,
perhaps I'm misunderstanding your proposal. Gmail does have advanced filtering
though for forwarding to other addresses.

------
tanishalfelven
Personally I use [http://Fakemailgenerator.com](http://Fakemailgenerator.com).
These seem to be getting a lot more popular lately..

------
stonogo
How does this differ from guerrillamail.com?

~~~
RoseO
It's probably not blocked by most websites yet :)

Edit: Scratch that, it's not a new site.

------
paromi
There are tons of similar sites to choose. I use
[http://tempsky.com](http://tempsky.com) for some time and had no problems

