Mailinator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mailinator is a disposable e-mail address service created in 2003 by Paul Tyma, a software engineer at Google. It accepts mail for any username and allows anyone to read it without having to create an account or enter a password. It is intended to allow people to provide an anonymous and temporary address to an untrusted person, such as a website suspected of selling addresses to spammers.
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[edit] Description
Any time Mailinator receives an e-mail, it checks if there is already a mailbox with that username. If there is one, it adds the new e-mail to the mailbox. If there is not a mailbox, a new mailbox with the new username is automatically created, and the new e-mail is stored.
To check a mailbox, the user goes to the Mailinator website and enters the e-mail name of the account. There are no passwords and there is no way to keep others from seeing the e-mail. It is not intended to be secure so should not be used for sending sensitive information. If two or more people happen to use the same e-mail address, their e-mails will end up in the same mailbox. E-mail cannot be deleted manually, instead it is auto-deleted after a few hours. It is not possible to send email from a Mailinator address.
The advantage is that a random mailbox may be created at any time. If an e-mail address is needed to sign up for an online website, for example, a user may supply a Mailinator e-mail address to avoid receiving e-mail spam from that website, or having their email address sold to spammers.
For some degree of security, a very hard to guess username may be provided, up to 15 characters in length. For example, a random set of characters like j25Dkelrp09s@mailinator.com would be very difficult to guess. Nevertheless, the e-mail is not secure, and if someone does guess the name, they will see the e-mail. Also, as some services are recognizing these open e-mail addresses, more sites are blocking them from being used. So now there are alternate domains that forward mail to the appropriate mail boxes at Mailinator; These sites are:
- klassmaster.com
- mailinater.com
- sogetthis.com
- fakeinformation.com
[edit] Problems for Website Owners
Although the advantages for the user are clear, there is another problem that comes from this service. Indeed, e-mail validation to prevent malicious users from spamming websites becomes obsolete, and it becomes easy for a user with bad intentions to register multiple accounts (since most websites confirm accounts by sending an e-mail to the inputted address).
[edit] Problems for Users
Domains from services like mailinator are banned from many websites for the reasons stated above. Mailinator provides alternate domains which work around this ban in many cases.
[edit] See also
[edit] External link
- Mailinator - Mailinator homepage
- Paul Tyma's blog - Description of the Mailinator architecture by its founder, Paul Tyma
- New York Times Technology - Review of Mailinator
