Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Mailinator

Apparently, I've never written here about Mailinator before.  It is a great service for those websites that force you to register to see content.  The idea is simple.  Enter any random email address @mailinator.com in the registration, and then any emails sent to it are publicly viewable for 24 hours, allowing you to click to confirmation link.  For example here are some inboxes:
monkeys@mailinator.com
MileyCyrus@mailinator.com 
StinkyDog@mailinator.com

Just to be clear, you don't have to set up anything before hand.  Just enter anything you want and end it with @mailinator.com and then you (or anyone else) can check the mail.

There are some additional useful features.  First, it has alternate domain names, which still go to the same inboxes, but allow you got get around admins who block @mailinator.com.  For example monkeys@devnullmail.com will go to the same inbox as monkeys@mailinator.com.  Here is an amusing story about how the guy who runs mailinator handled people trying to scrape all the alternate domains to block them.

Another interesting feature is that you can point the mx record of any domain you own to mailinator, and it will function the same as the above alternative domains.  In other words, I could set up daleswanson.org's mx record such that emails to monkeys@daleswansonson.org go to the same inbox as above.

Lastly, there are alternative inbox names.  This means that every inbox has an alternative "secret" name, which is displayed on the inbox's page.  For example the alternative for monkeys@mailinator.com is M8R-b8esq@mailinator.com.  Emails sent there will go to the same monkeys@mailinator.com inbox that I've been using as an example.  The point of this is to allow you to think up a somewhat long and random inbox name, and then only give out the alternate one.  This, in effect, makes your inbox name a password, and gives you some privacy. 

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