The biggest problem with these services is they never last. It's easy to set up something like this, but there are so many of these services and so few non-technical people understand the need/purpose of them, they don't get the traction required to be viable and disappear, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle for the overall "disposable email" sector as folks realize that you can't trust any of these services to stick around...
The "disposable" in "disposable email" implies that you don't intend on keeping the address around. Under that use case, the service disappearing after a year or two doesn't cause any issues, because you don't have anything persistent attached to those emails in the first place. Besides, many (most?) other email services prevent you from recovering an email address (usually because a random address is assigned to you and there's no way to pick/recover a previous address), so you're already discouraged from using them for any persistent services.
Eh, I don't know if that's really a problem. Query "10 minute mail" in Google gives hundreds of results within a millisecond, so... you do this lookup once in 2 years and you're done? Really don't feel like it's a big deal, at least for me
Yes, that's precisely why I'm querying more often than bookmarking sites. They "expire" soon so I kinda have to find replacements. Apple's situation is interesting, I don't think sites can ban Apple's iCloud completely. It may also be an opportunity for Gmail to copy the feature..
To be fair, Mailinator https://www.mailinator.com has been around since it's inception in 2003. It offers other services now, but the "disposable email" part is still there as it was from the start.
Similarly spamgourmet has been around since 2001 and other than some brief outages (around the time the founder was sadly struggling with a terminal illness and figuring out succession plans) it's doing fine.
Services tend to be blocked when they get abused by spammers. So if you want something like this to last, it would make sense to heavily leverage either plain old CAPTCHA's or the newer privacy-preserving "proofs of human presence".
Whenever I try that, the number doesn't work. I either get an error message that the number isn't valid, or the text never arrives.
I think I tried with it with Twitter, Instagram and Google (when they asked me for a phone number and I didn't want to give my real one); this was about two years ago. Does anyone have better results?
When it comes to big providers like them you can assume that all numbers are either used by other people already or blocked.
If you just don't want to give out your number you could get a second one? Nowadays with eSim it should be easy to get a "pay as you go" number and only ever receive sms.
I eventually did get a second number and was still blocked by Instagram. Perhaps it was because of earlier attempts with temp phone numbers (I didn’t use VPN). But I don’t know for sure. I gave up after that.
Sure, but how long until the sites that require an email to set up a new account add this to their list of blocked providers (or just switch to requiring a sms number like some of the bigger sites already do)?
Or ar least I'm assuming that's a primary use case for something like this.
As someone who used Mailinator for a long time, the world can always use more of these services - what’s unfortunate is that it’s an arms race. As domains are known to be fronts for disposable emails, they just get blocked. Apple’s hide my email is great because they cannot block iCloud, and it would be great if Google or Microsoft offered similar services.
Free for services that use Sign in with Apple. Need iCloud+ for generating addresses outside of that.
Also, 99 cents a month for the cheapest plan isn’t too bad for everything it gives you. If you’re in the iOS/Apple ecosystem, it’s a worthwhile purchase.
It's created automatically (or manually) for any email prompt. It is automatically set for the domain so fill in provides the forward address automatically. You can turn this off and you can delete the forward address anytime you want.
A disposable email in the form provided by this service, the emails essentially go into a black void. They don't go to your normal inbox like the ones provided by Apple do.
I wish those many disposable email service would opensource. Running my own would be the best. I built one a long time ago that was getting emails piped to but it was cpanel and by no means a generic email service I could deploy anywhere
If you are a fastmail user, they provide a similar option. You can create masked email on @fastmail.com that redirect to your inbox and then delete it when you are done.
Also have you consider plus addresses or . addresses ("." is preferred if your email provider supports it -- harder to assume that you can just remove the dots for downstream spammers).
[EDIT] Did some quick searching, and the F/OSS community has delivered! There are at least two you could use:
I run a small digitalocean instance with just postfix running on it that forwards to my real email address at gmail, using aliases. It takes me under 15 seconds to log in, create a new aliases, and run 'newaliases'. This way I can keep aliases around that are important and when they start spamming, just go delete it until I need it again.
