Really new and innovative concepts are relatively rare, but Mailinator qualifies, with bonus points for its elegant simlicity
Have you ever needed an email .. NOW? Have you ever gone to a website that asks for your email for no reason (other than they are going to sell your email address to the highest bidder so you get spammed forever)?
With the new Mailinator free Webmail service, there is no no signup. You get instant email.
Here is how it works: Say you are on the web, at a party, or wherever and someone or some webpage asks for your email address. You know if you give it, you’ll be spammed. On the other hand, you do want at least one email from that person. The answer is to give them a mailinator address. You don’t need any prior sign-up. Just make up a new email address on the spot -- something you will remember yourself that will be unlikely to be chosen by someome else, such as whateveryoulike@mailinator.com or iwontforgetthisaddress@mailinator.com. You can pick anything you want up to 15 characters before the @ sign, but avoid addresses like bob@mailinator.com.
Then to check for messages from the party to whom you have provided with this unique address, just go to the Mailinator Website, type the address into the sign-in field (the address serves as its own password), and voila! -- any messages sent to that address will show up. I tried it. It works great. Not only that, the Mailinator Website is an exemplar of tasteful, attractive and functional site design and is very fast.
After you check them, emails will automatically be deleted for you after a few hours.
Mailinator is a service of Outscheme, Inc. that was created out of the frustration over spam. Where Mailinator is truly YASS (yet another spam solution) it approaches the problem a bit differently. First of all, it focuses on only one niche of the spam problem. However, what it does, it does well. Mailinator solves the problem of handing your email out to just anyone. You’ve always got a new spam-free email address ready-and-waiting.
Mailinator is meant to be used by people on a semi-regular basis when they simply “need” an email address right now. One that they know they won’t need later. It’s free, never asks anything about you and is always ready to go. It fills a real gap.
Note that Mailinator has no send capabilities. In summary, the differences between Mailinator and regular email services are:
• Mailinator requires no sign-up. To create an account, you send email to it.
• You cannot send email from Mailinator.
• Your Mailinator email inbox can be read by anyone. There is no security. If they know (or guess) your email address, they can read your mail.
• You cannot delete your email or reply thriugh Mailinator. After a few hours, all email is auto-deleted.
• Mailinator has strict rules about what kind of email it receives. Plain text is best, html is filtered. Images, attachments, and fancy stuff are simply stripped away.
• Attachments aren’t allowed and any given mailbox will only hold 10 messages at once. Any email that the mailinator isn’t happy with (for these or other reasons) will never make it into the system. Other rejection criteria may include email size (max 100k), too many recipients, etc.
• In a nutshell, other services provide much more functionality but require a sign-up (where you can falsify all the information really anyway). Mailinator provides less, but requires no sign-up.
• Signing up for an email service takes time - that’s probably ok for most emailing, but every now and then you need a quick email address for just a single email. After that you don’t care what happens to it. Given that such disposable email is ready at your disposal, you can avoid giving out your real email address when you are afraid of getting spammed. Instead, make up any address @mailinator.com on the spot and go check it later.
• Privacy Policy? At Mailinator, THERE IS NONE. Expect that any email you send or have sent to Mailinator can be viewed by anyone. In fact, wiley spam guys might start scraping the mailboxes of bob@mailinator.com or something. Its perfectly possible. Mailinator/Outscheme does NOT ask, require or even want any of your personal information. This service is not much different than the existing Usenet - what you put out there is world-viewable. Keep that in mind.
• Mailinator gives you an opportunity to skirt one avenue that spammers use to spam you. By no means does Mailinator “solve” the spam problem, but it does provide a solution for one specific part of the spam problem.
