How to create a temporary email address?

These days email has become an inevitable part of one’s identity. An email address field has become vitalin application forms dealing with various arenas. For instance, when you apply for a new Debit card at a local bank, you are asked regarding your email address.

Why you need to create a temporary email address?

On the flip side, we need to share email address to create an online account on most of the websites. Say you want to join twitter, you need an email, but that is obvious. The hassle arises when you don’t want to share your personal email address to a third party website that you cannot trust, but you really want to create an account with them. Once you register with a website, the usual scenario is that you get tons of unsolicited email newsletters and ads which can be otherwise termed as ‘spam’.

Example – If you want to download an e book from a website which is not trust worthy, you may not want to use your real email address, you can use your newly created disposable e mail address.

Thus I have a guide on how to create a temporary email address, which will get expired after some time. So you can try out an online account without having to share your personal email address.

Some of the Disposable email services are given below

• Guerrilla mail– E mail address that you choose in Guerrilla mail may not actually expire. After every hour mails that are their in inbox get deleted. It’s been some time that e mail sending feature has been added to this.
• Temp-mail -E mail id made this service expires in 2 hours
• Temp e mail– They have a capcha verification for mail id creation. Validity of the mailbox is 14 days. You can choose your own email id, that looks real.
• Get air mail– You can only receive emails, replying to messages or sending out a mail is not allowed
• Mailinator-It allows you to only receive e mails but you can forward a mail to a real mail id using this service After several hours, all e mails are deleted. E mail addresses are real looking, it provides you with alternate inbox names.

While all of these work equally well, but the one that I use the most is 10 minute mail.

First you need to head over to a website called 10minutemail. Once you get there, you are half done with creating a temporary email address.

Once you open up their homepage, you will see an email address in a text box as shown in the above screenshot. Well, this is the temporary email address that you are going to work with.

Now, let’s try sending an email to this address to make sure it’s working. I will be sending a mail that has some credentials like username and a link to complete registration.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the confirmation mail has reached the inbox of our disposable email address. You can scroll down to the page to see the messages that you have received or click on the subject to get a detailed view and forward the same. You can also send a reply message from the mails in your inbox.

Only flip side of using 10 minute mail is that – the mail id’s are randomly generated so they don’t look like real e mail addresses. This is actually fine also as the intent is temporary in nature, More over you are not sharing this mail id for correspondence.

This can be a blessing for SEOs (search engine optimizers) around the world and I will let you know why. As an SEO, you may have to register at hundreds of websites to get citations, listings and so on. Obviously, you cannot share your personal email address on a local business website. Some people create a separate email ID for dealing with these accounts. It’s quite convenient I would say, however, you have to login to it all the time and separate it from your personal mail. Thus, it’s always a pain in the neck. The plus of using a temporary email address is that you get to see the mails coming in instantly. There is no boring procedures of login, logout and so on. You simply create an account and forget.

Scenarios where you shouldn’t use a temporary email address

Well, so far we have seen some of the advantages of having a temporary email address. Now let’s take a look at some scenarios where you shouldn’t use it.

• Online banking and other accounts dealing with money – This is a big No-No.
• Scenarios wherein a website will send precious details to the email of the account holder.
• Any account that you will be using more than once. Say if you are joining a forum that you wish to use for some long time, it is a better idea to use a permanent email address like Gmail.
• Always use a valid yet genuine email address for creating accounts on sites like twitter, Facebook or any such kind of social networks.

Things you cannot do with a temporary email address

• There can be times (although very rare) when you won’t receive any mail. You may have to repeat the process again.
• Some websites may blacklist the domains of disposable email vendors. Hence they won’t accept these emails and may ask you to enter a valid address such as Gmail or Yahoo.

Now you know how to create a temporary email address, it’s time to give it a try. Always make sure that you are not dealing with anything important, and don’t spam! 😉