Avoid Inbox Spam by Using a Free Temporary Email Address

Your email address can be a precious thing to you especially when you’re lucky enough to get a login name that you want. These days, for many people an email address can be nearly as important to them as a home address or a phone number because of the paperless world we live in.

Everywhere you go online, it seems that somebody is asking for your email address whether it seems there’s a valid reason for it or not. This can range from newsgroups, mailing lists or discussion boards, to shopping sites or simply to download a piece of freeware. Everybody wants it because they know how valuable it can be.

The problem is, every time you give out your email address to someone, you run the risk of being bombarded with advertising or promotional messages, even if you think you have opted out of any questions asking for your permission. And, once your email gets onto a spammer’s list, it’s very hard to get off even if you try faking a bounce email to them. You might be able to unsubscribe from some of these messages, but sometimes it can take weeks for you to get off the list, or the option just doesn’t work at all.

You can’t really just keep your email address a secret from everyone either. What’s the point of having email if nobody can write to you?

Ever heard of the term “Temporary Email“? Some of you might have heard of it and even used it. For those hearing this for the first time, carry on reading, because it might be exactly what you’re looking for…

There are a few websites around that provide a free temporary email service. These temporary mailbox services will usually expire after a short period of time. This can range from just a few minutes to several days, and some you can even customize yourself. But the general idea is for the service to be there long enough for you to receive a reply from whoever the address was given to.

You can create a temporary email address and anyone can login without a password, even another user who accidentally creates the same name, which makes these services very bad for private or personal messages. Make sure you are not using common user names such as “admin”, “guest”, “raymond”… and etc. Use more specific names such as “raymondcc2468″. A few sites do not offer you the power to choose the login name and they randomly generate a login name for you.

A few even provide secured temporary email address which you need to have both login and password to access the temporary mailbox. As for sending anonymous emails from the temporary email account, not all have this function, they will need to be checked individually for this feature. It is worth trying BugMeNot first, a website that offers shared login so you don’t need to go through the registration to access the website. If there are no shared login available, go ahead and use any of the temporary email services listed below.

Below are some websites that offer free temporary email services in no particular order of preference.

1. Mailcatch

• Emails removal time depends of server load (few hours to few days)
• Own choice of login name of 1 to 25 characters
• Available RSS feed for your inbox
• A Firefox add-on is available

2. MyTrashMail

• Emails removed after up to 30 days (smaller mails stay longer)
• Own choice of login name
• Able to send anonymous email
• Offers secure email (needs password)
• Email Forwarding

3. Mailinator

• Emails removed after 5 days
• Holds only 10 emails at once in the inbox (no attachments)
• Own choice of login name up to 25 characters
• Random name suggestions
• Available RSS/Atom feed
• Can be used in POP email client like Outlook etc.

4. MailNull

• Must create an account using real email
• Own choice of login name
• Email forwarded to you real email address

5. Jetable

• Emails removed after 1 hour/1 day/1 week/1 month
• Generates random login name for you
• Needs authenticating via real email address
• Email Forwarding

6. Mailexpire

• Emails removed after selected period of 12 hours up to 3 months
• Generates random login name for you
• Email forwarded so requires a real email address
• Can create alias

7. GuerrillaMail

• Unchecked mails held for 1 hour
• Checked mails held for another extra hour
• Beta mail sender can send mails up to 150MB
• Choice of random or custom login name
• Can create alias of address

8. 10MinuteMail

• Generates random mail address for you
• Expires after 10 minutes
• Can click to extend for a further 10 minutes

9. Spambox

• Multilingual with 12 languages
• Address removed from 30 mins up to 1 year
• Needs real email address
• Incoming emails automatically forwarded to your real email

10. MyTempEmail

• Address expires in 30 minutes
• Can extend another 30 minutes
• Able to generate random or custom email address
• Can reply to received emails from temporary adress
• Forward emails to your real address for 1 hour up to 4 weeks

11. TempEMail

• Own choice of login name
• Messages and address expire after 14 days

12. YopMail

• Random or user generated email address
• Messages kept for 8 days
• Firefox, IE extensions and Opera widget
• Setup alias for your inbox
• Can send emails to other YopMail addresses

Hope this article is useful for everyone to avoid being in the spammer’s list :)

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