I’ve recently been receiving a lot of spam in my secondary inbox, one that I do not provide to the general public or Raymond.cc readers, but the personal email address that I use on my resumes and provide to close friends. This leads me to believe that I should have possibly used a disposable email service to receive my messages or try to figure out which people I shouldn’t have trusted so easily to allow them to spam me. However, there are a lot of different solutions to who or what could have spammed me and the easiest idea is quite possibly the most realistic: they spammed me in a blanket spam attack, basically sending it to all the Pauls at GMX.com. While there is no way to prevent something this, disposable emails are a godsend at keeping spam out of your main email accounts. And while I’m aware Raymond has covered this topic before, he covered it about five years ago so some services have come and gone in that time frame. Today I’m going to share with you the disposable email services I have used and continue to use whenever I need a disposable email address.
Mailinator
Mailinator is long considered by many to be a standard in disposable emails and is also one of the longest running, running all the way back until 2003. It does not offer a password system and your emails can be from one character to twenty-five characters long, but no matter what you choose, there is a ten character limit and only accepts plain text emails, for HTML emails and other add-ons we take for standard are ‘stripped away’, in their own words. While that means no infections though Mailinator, it does make for a limited mail experience. It has a list of alternate domains you can also send emails to, which will still forward onto Mailinator’s main domain and email box you choose. Mailinator also offers an additional ‘widget’ to post your emails to the disposable email account onto your website.
YOPMail
YOPMail is a lot like Mailinator, in that it offers the same basic features, though it also has some temporary domains as well as the permanent domains as well. Unlike Mailinator, however, YOPMail allows you to store messages as long as eight days from the original send date, as well as sending emails to other YOPMail users. While I don’t see a point to the latter of the two features, it is something different from the norm. YOPMail also offers browser integration for Opera, Internet Explorer, and Firefox.
MyTrashMail
MyTrashMail constantly changes it’s domains that it sends the mail to, but it’s next to never blacklisted on any of the sites I’ve used it on, making it one of the best disposable email services I’ve used in a long time. Sadly, it does come with the downside of storing the emails on their servers between 2 hours and 3 days. The maximum size for the inboxes are 4 mb and no emails are allowed over 2 mb, however, attachments are still allowed. It also allows for PRO features such as forwarding the MyTrashMail emails onto your real email, as well as allowing emails to be stored on their servers for up to 30 days, as well as Secure Temporary Email Addresses, and creating an RSS feed for your temporary email. For free or if you pay, MyTrashMail is a high cut above the basics that Mailinator and YOPMail offer you!
Trashmail.Net
Unrelated to MyTrashMail, TrashMail.Net makes itself a unique anti-spam service by setting up an temporary email address and will forward up to ten emails or last for one month, redirecting emails that the fake email address gets and forwarding them onto your real email address. Of course, there is also a paid option that will allow for unlimited forwards and unlimited emails as well, however, this will set you back about $5.49 USD a year. This is an amazing deal if you ask me, and if you need it, then by all means, go for it. It does offer 11 different domain choices, and none of them are restricted to only paid users, meaning you can use any of them without problems. It also has a Firefox add-on for you, in case you constantly use it.
MeltMail
MeltMail follows TrashMail’s lead, however, it’s email services only last up to 24 hours. While this might not be a long period of time, I saw nothing on the site that suggests you might be limited to a certain amount of email coming in. So if you are trying to get a lot of email coming in, MeltMail might be the best for a temporary email that can be emailed to. It also has an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad application for those who have an Apple product that could use them. Otherwise, unless you expect high incomes of emails, MeltMail comes across as a thawed product.
So there you have it. Five secure disposable email services for you. All of them are free for basic use, and two have highly advanced paid versions if you require more then what they offer free users. If you need more spam protection, there are other disposable mail services out there as well as fully featured spam guards as well. I’ve personally never had to go that far yet, but I might just have to, just to prevent the blanket spam that inspired this post.
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