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by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 09/21/2012, 9:47pm PDT |
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Mailinator.com is a really great service. For free, they give you - and anyone - a temporary incoming mailbox. No need to worry about spamming because all you want it for is for perhaps one reply message. When you want to check out a service, or want to test something where you're not sure if they're on the up-and-up or you want something like a free download they give you, or you want a way to receive an incoming piece of mail, and all of these require that you give them your e-mail address. Well, anyone can give anyaddress@mailinator.com and you can go to their website and look up the mailbox, there's no security, no passwords, no protection at all. Now, when you go to that mailbox you made up, it gives you the one-way code, that if you give that code out, like zu123457wx@mailinator.com it translates into anyaddress@mailinator.com (these are fictional examples), so that if you give someone the zu123457wx address it sends the mail to anyaddress and zu123457wx is empty, and there's no way to correlate the translated mailbox into the real one.
Well, the problem is there are places that recognize mailinator and refuse to accept e-mail addresses ending in it. And sometimes they know some of the aliases that Mailinator has, so that those addresses - like @notmailinator.com - are also blacklisted. The nice thing about it is if you find one of the domains that the site hasn't discovered points to mailinator, all you need is the name (like anyaddress) and anything sent to that mailbox on any of their domains goes into the same place.
I like the functionality and I'm glad the service is there; it's a shame that we don't have anon.penet.fi but misuse of the service got it shut down. The ability to create disposable accounts on public mail systems like Yahoo or Hotmail or GMail does provide some pseudonymous capacity, I like what Mailinator gives.
I just wish that places that want to harvest e-mail addresses weren't filtering it out. But I suppose you could do a pass-thru; register a cheap domain name from GoDaddy and have it pass-thru to mailinator, but then again, you could simply have it pass through to your own mailbox. But that also means you need a credit card account and so on and so forth and you'd have to set up the domain and so on. Sometimes it's a mess.
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