Making a temporary mail service truly comfortable for yourself is not an easy task. It would seem that it’s complicated: I googled the “temporary mail” request, got a bunch of sites in the search results, chose a mailbox and went on to the Internet about my business. But when there is a need to use temporary mail more than once a year, it is better to choose such a site more carefully. I share my experience in the form of a rating of 5 temporary mail services that I used.
What is temporary mail?
Temporary mail is a service that provides the user with a mailbox address on its site for a certain period of time. It usually burns out on its own after a few minutes. But, looking ahead, I will say that sites have already appeared on which it is stored for several days.
To create such mail, you need to go to the service provider's website and click the "Get" button. In general, each temporary mail site provides a convenient service where you do not need to spend time on registration and fill in several fields with your data. I just went to the site, created an address and entered it on the right site to start correspondence. To disable such mail, just close the tab in the browser or wait 10 minutes.
Cases when temporary mail can come in handy
- Spam protection. It is better to use such a mailbox to register on any unreliable site - for example, give it to the WiFi network provider at the airport (not very important in quarantine, of course, but sooner or later such a life hack will definitely come in handy for someone) or any potential spammer and lover of do- sales.
- Gaining access to a free course or program. I tried using temporary mail to renew access to trial versions of IQBuzz and PressIndex, and when I finally chose one of them (it was IQBuzz, for those who are interested), I registered the only software I needed to my main mail. In general, since then I have been testing everything on temporary mail.
- To check the development and e-mail marketing. Often you need to check the quality of the functionality or the display of the developed letter - and temporary mail helps to save time and quickly figure out possible problems yourself.
- Correspondence with an unknown sender. For those who don't want to take a big risk but really want to meet someone online, temporary email can be a great compromise for personal security. If on a dating site some suspicious (or not so) type wants to transfer correspondence into personal letters, I recommend that you protect yourself at least this way.
Which service is better to choose?
I decided to compare temporary mail sites according to criteria that turned out to be important and defining for me. In parentheses, I note that each of these services meets the required minimum to receive the definition of "temporary mail", but the first four had to be abandoned due to their shortcomings (all the details below). If there is a need to compare these sites by some other criterion, let me know in the comments, I will briefly describe. I can't say anything about other services because I haven't tried them.
TempMail.org
10minutemail
Tempinbox
GuerrillaMail
TempMail+
Storage time
letters
hours before 2
up to 100 minutes (10 by default)
hours before 24
to 1 hours
to 7 days
Obtaining
Without interruption
intermittently
Without interruption
intermittently
Without interruption
Garbage on site
Advertising 80%
Advertising 60%
Advertising 10%
Advertising 10%
0% advertising
Design
Littered
Few features
Need transitions
Required minimum
Required minimum
Domain selection
no choice
no choice
5 options
11 options
5 options
Once upon a time, I needed temporary mail for the first time, this service was the only one and one of the best for a long time, but then the guys were swallowed up by advertising. Useful features fell off one by one: the multi-domain selection function stopped working, the box began to freeze, and in general the site now looks very suspicious for Google.
Of the strengths - the presence of browser plugins and the display of the temporary mail API. It is also convenient that even if you close the tab and return to the site after a few minutes, you still see the address of your temporary mail. This is convenient, first of all, because by clicking on links in your temporary mail, you do not open a window in a new tab, but remain in the same one. Plus, there's a QR code to switch to inbox view from your smartphone. But, to be honest, the convenience is relative, because now you have to pass the captcha test before each new action.
Of the minuses of the service - a lot of advertising and cross-links. The site is so overloaded with this junk that it looks like a spam bin with all emails open at the same time. And the funny thing about all this is that even the temporary mailbox itself receives automatic spam! In general, now the site is completely unsuitable for temporary mail and for any purpose, unfortunately.
At the moment, I actively use this particular service. It contains the best that I have seen from others - and all without water and advertising.
What I like:
It is possible to save all letters and the mailbox itself for a week.
You can set a pin code and even create a secret email address that will help keep the name of the main mailbox a secret.
You can write a letter yourself or manually delete all letters.
You can enter the mailbox name manually or ask the service to come up with it randomly.
One small but decisive detail - of all the temporary mail services that I used, only the developers of TempMail Plus came up with an ingeniously simple one: any link that comes to a temporary mail opens in a new tab, not the same one.
After months of going back and looking for tabs in History, this is proving to be so handy!
What is not OK: it is clear that the site is new, and the design looks half-baked. Plus, from the experience of using other sites of temporary mail, I suspect that such a site without ads will not last long (although they seem to work on donations so far). Therefore, I recognize that the relevance of this rating may change over time. But for me, TempMail.Plus is by far the most enjoyable and efficient temporary mail service out there.
This mail service is another classic of temporary mail. It is thanks to 10minutemail that the term “mail for 10 minutes” appeared as the main synonym for the query “temp mail”. But, like Temp-Mail.org, this service is slowly losing ground in comparison with other competitors in the market. Let there be much less advertising on it.
The main advantage of the service is ease of use. Entering the page, you can see two fields: an ad block, a huge timer counting down 10 minutes, and a field for a ready address and a temporary mailbox. Come in and you're all set.
However, with the increase in the number of offers on the market, the life of the mail, which lasts only 10 minutes, is not enough. You have to either keep the tab always open, or regularly press the “give me 10 more minutes” button (which, by the way, is only possible 10 times). Plus, in the case of my registration on PressIndex, the temporary mail failed - in 10 minutes not a single letter arrived at the box. And once you refresh the tab, you lose your mail forever. Therefore, in practice, such mail really turns out to be one-time and not adapted to lengthy correspondence.
Tempinbox is a relative newcomer to the market, and therefore looks much more attractive than many other temporary mail services. I used it for a very long time, and I recommend starting testing from this site, and not from the first two - even if you need temporary mail for a very quick and trifling matter.
The main convenience of tempinbox is the emphasis on maximum customization of the process of creating a temporary box. In more detail, there are two main ways to create mail on the site. First: press the Random button and get access to a randomly generated mail service. Second: get a little confused and choose both the e-mail ID and the domain yourself - all the more, the choice is interesting: from the mocky fakemyinbox.com to the more serious fitschool.space. Also on the main page is a minimum of advertising that after 10minutemail and Temp-Mail looks like a breath of fresh air.
The main drawback of the site: although the address of a temporary mailbox is assigned to the user forever (read: until the life of the domain on which he is registered), the letters themselves disappear automatically after 24 hours. Therefore, it will be impossible to return to something important (like an account password) on this service. In my case, the emails self-destructed after just a couple of seconds. And when I needed a password for the account I created yesterday, it became clear that tempinbox was no longer suitable for me.
I tried switching to Guerrilla Mail. After reading positive reviews, I realized that it is crammed with a bunch of useful features - but in practice there are so many of them that nothing works well.
In general, I am very impressed with the design and UX of the site. The temporary box already contains a letter with instructions for using the service. Mail is updated every 10 seconds and there are 11 domains to choose from. Also, the site has a separate “Send” tab, which is especially convenient for personal correspondence.
But for me, Guerrilla Mail turned out to be completely inconvenient. Letters are stored on the mailbox for only an hour - which is less even in comparison with the same tempinbox. It is still not very convenient to copy the address of the generated mail - you need to look for it in the letter with instructions. Yes, and letters reach this mailbox intermittently.
Thank you for your attention. Hope it was helpful.
Source: habr.com