Many of us don’t know how temporary email services could protect our online privacy and safeguard our main email account from piling up with junk, spam, or promotional emails.
Nowadays, some websites — not us! — required registration in order to view their content. As the content is interesting or useful for us, most of the time, we went on with the process.
While register, they ask us for an email address; we enter our email address as we have no choice. Sometimes, the problem is that in addition to that information these websites share, they often spam our inbox with their promotional and other useless mails on many occasions.
One of the things we can do to avoid this is to use a temporary email address or disposable email services to protect our privacy. Temporary email services provide temporary, secure, anonymous, free, disposable email addresses that will only work for a short time.
Why Temporary Email Services?
A temporary email could be defined as one that can be created without pre-registration; they are also offered for free and have a fixed term. When we create an email of this kind, there are three very important things to consider:
- It will have a limited lifetime.
- When that period ends, it will expire, and we will no longer be able to use it.
- It is not an account that we will provide to anyone as a method of communicating. Since after the specified time, we will stop having access to it.
Main Purpose Of Temporary Email Services
Prevent spam or junk emails from reaching our official email inbox. They offer us a great level of privacy since we wont have to give our email if we do not want to.
Currently, it is normal that we have more than one email, even if it is simply to separate personal life from work. Sometimes, we leave that mail unattended. Perhaps, we do not use every day, and when we enter, we see the inbox with a lot of unread emails. Mostly these emails are spam, and we waste a lot of time deleting them.
In short, we are facing a class of email accounts designed to keep spam from our usual email address. Therefore, by using some of the best temporary email services not only we keep our real mailbox clean but also protect and secure our privacy in the long run by avoiding the spam emails, hacking and attacking robots.
Best Temporary Email Services:
1. Temp Mail
The Temp Mail is one of the best and easiest free temporary email services to use. We don’t have to do anything — a temporary email address get auto-generated when we enter the website’s main screen, and just below, we can see the email inbox, all without the need to register. We can also easily change the email address by clicking on “Change” and frequently refresh our inbox with the “Refresh” option.
There is also a “10 minute Mail” option where we can instantly generate a disposable 10 Minute Mail that self-destructed just after ten minutes. Temp Mail also has a premium plan with more features.
2. Mail Poof
Mail Poof is a free temporary email address that you can use for one-time emails. This temporary email service auto destructs emails you received after 24 hours. You can also generate your own email address or let the system create a random temp mail for you.
3. Mailinator
Mailinator is a very useful service when we want to create a temporary email to avoid unwanted messages in the inbox of our real email. One important thing to consider while using Mailnator is that all emails and inboxes are in the public domain. This means that anyone can read and delete them if they enter the correct inbox. So, there is no privacy in the public system, and it is mostly suited for occasional personal use.
We do not need to register to use the public system. We can use the one we are given or create a new email address one by pressing “GO.” We can put any name we want with a limit of up to 50 characters to create a new email.
It should also be noted that all emails in Mailinator are deleted automatically after a few hours and cannot be recovered. Also, Mailinator’s public emails have certain rules like the mails cannot contain attachments (if some attachments exist, they will not be delivered or will be removed), and sending an email from Mailinator is not possible.
4. EmailOnDeck
EmailOnDeck simple and free platform to create throwaway emails. The service will help you to avoid spam, protect your online privacy, and stop you from having to give away your personal email address to every company and person on the internet.
5. Guerrilla Mail
Guerrilla Mail is another best temporary email service to protect your privacy. Thanks to it, we will be able to create our temporary email account in a few seconds and without registration. One important thing to note is that the account we create in Guerrilla Mail expires after 60 minutes. After that period of time, the messages will be deleted and we will no longer have access to that email.
6. Maildrop
Another temporary mail alternative is Maildrop, in which messages must occupy less than 500KB in size. Also, all attachments are removed and discarded automatically. Regarding the inbox, it can contain a maximum of 10 messages. A relevant fact is that any temporary email that does not receive a message within 24 hours will be automatically deleted.
7. FakeMail
FakeMail is one of the most efficient disposable email platforms around. It is incredibly easy to use and doesn’t require technical knowledge. With FakeMail, you can auto-generate a temporary email that last for 10 mins, 1 day, 3 days, 5 days, 1 week or 2 weeks.
8. ThrowAwayMail
Like other temporary email services, ThrowAwayMail generates email addresses that expire after 48 hours. If you do not visit your mail inbox within 48 hours, it will be deleted. Once visited, your mailbox extends to another 48 hours.
9. Email Generator
Email Generator allows you to generate a disposable email with different usernames and domains. The service also allows you to access the inbox of the old emails you generated through the platform.
10. MyTemp
MyTemp is a free temporary email service that generates a random email address you can use when registering to new websites or test-driving untrusted services. All emails received by MyTemp servers are displayed automatically in your online browser inbox.
11. YOPmail
YOPmail is one of the most popular and best temporary email services which can help to protect your privacy. Initially, it generates a random email address, but we can change it without problems. One very important thing to keep in mind is that it allows us to keep messages up to a maximum period of 8 days. However, if we need it, we can remove them from the inbox at any time.
12. 10 Minute Mail
Another best disposable email service to protect your privacy is 10 Minute Mail. This platform offers us the possibility of creating a temporary email that will expire 10 minutes after its creation. In case we need it, we can further extend its duration in time periods of 10 minutes. If we want to extend the given period of time, we must click on “Get 10 more minutes.” Once that period of time has elapsed, if we have not renewed it, it will disappear automatically.
Finally, using the best temporary email services to protect your privacy will avoid having to delete a lot of spam in our email. Try to remember one of the above-listed email alternatives the next time you doubt a website’s intentions.
Hi Vishak,
I’ve exhaustively tried other Throw-away email services to make an anonymous ProtonMail account through TOR from looking at other sites/Reddit posts, and it didn’t work. Your suggestions did! I’m going to try sign up for as ProtonMail accounts (for compartmentalization) as I can since OpSec is very, very important for me in my particular circumstance (not going to go into details there, of course). Who knows when PM will disable those domains that work as of late Feb 2022.
Here is my comment for this post on Reddit. I’ve shown my appreciation for your article. You don’t know how much your article helped me. Again, thank you so much, Vishak!
I needed to desperately get my anonymous communications going to interesting people. Here is is the Reddit URL (my username: OnlyParanoidsSurvive): https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/sy2q0x/how_anonymous_is_protonmail_using_tor/hyl59h6/?context=3
Cheers!
– O.P.S.