Difference between revisions 607782405 and 607784823 on enwiki

{{refimprove|date=December 2011}}
'''Mailinator''' is a free [[disposable email address]] service created in 2003 by [[Paul Tyma]]. The idea is to let a user invent a new [[email address]] on  -the  -fly, whenever needed, for instance, while filling in a form on a [[wWeb  site]].

Mailinator will accept mail for any [[email address]] addressed to any domain that arrives at the mMailinator servers,<ref name=OPM>{{Cite web |url=http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/01/your-own-private-mailinator.html |title=Mailinator Blog: Your own private Mailinator |date=January 21, 2008}}</ref> and allows anyone to read it. There is no need to register for an account or authenticate via a [[password]]. It is intended to provide users with an anonymous and temporary [[email address]] to help reduce [[email|Inbox]] [[email spam|spam]].

==Description==
Arriving [[email]] with a specific recipient name "creates" accounts at Mailinator. It is not required that an account or mailbox with the recipient's name be created beforehand.

To check received mail, a user goes tovisits the Mailinator website and enters the recipient name. There are no passwords and there is no way to keep others from seeing the [[email]]messages, except by choosing a very-hard-to-guess [[user (computing)|username]] (usernames can be up to 25 characters in length) or using the "cloaked" address for that [[user (computing)|username]], (as explained below). Therefore, Mailinator is not intended and should not be used for sensitive information. Users can delete [[email]]messages upon reading ithem or allow the system to auto-delete ithem after a few hours. Mail cannot be sent from the Mailinator website.

All [[email]] sent to mMailinator is automatically deleted after a day (sometimes, or sooner), whether or not the user reads it.

Mailinator has introduced a "cloaking" feature in which every recipient name has a cloaked identifier starting with "M8R-" and a string of characters.  Mail may be sent to either the original recipient name or the cloaked name.  Mail will only go to the mailbox for the original recipient name, and the cloaked address will always have an empty mailbox.  For example, the recipient name ''wikipedia'' ("[email protected]&quo(contracted; show full)

In addition, messages may be dropped silently for a number of reasons, making it unwise to use Mailinator for emails that cannot be re-sent to another address.

Each mailbox also has a ten-message limit, which means that choosing a unique address is important. Presumably, this is to prevent a flood of mail to a single address
 from, forcing the Mailinator system to delete messages from other mailboxes earlier than usual.

According to the Mailinator Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), plain text messages are best, as [[HTML]] is filtered. Images, attachments and styles are simply stripped away.  However, when a message is displayed, a "text view" can be selected, displaying the message source code.  The source code can be copied to a local text file with the .eml extension and opened for viewing with a mail client program that is capable of doing so, displaying formatted HTML mail just as it was sent.<ref>The Mailinator site was redesigned in mid-2013, and as of mid-2014 the [http://www.mailinator.com/faq.html FAQ] no longer mentions this aspect of usage.</ref>

==  See also  ==
⏎
⏎
*[[Disposable e-mail address]]
*[[Spamgourmet]]
*[[TrashMail]]⏎
*[[Paul Tyma]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==External links==
*[http://www.mailinator.com Mailinator] -.com]&nbsp;— Mailinator homepage
*[http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2006/12/architecture-of-mailinator.html Paul Tyma's blog] -&nbsp;— Description of the Mailinator architecture by its founder, Paul Tyma
*[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E6DD173EF935A25753C1A9659C8B63 New York Times Technology] -&nbsp;— Review of Mailinator

[[Category:Webmail]]
[[Category:Anti-spam]]