When you are at a sign-up screen on a website that you yet trust, using a fake but working email address might be a good idea moving forward to get yourself signed up without giving up your email address. Or, when you want to send an anonymous tip or joke to other people, it’s fun using a temporary email address that cannot be traced back to you.

10 Minute Mail is a free web service that offers a temporary email address that expires after 10 minutes of inactive use. Head over to the website which automatically redirects to a page that provides a valid email address with a 10-minute countdown.

You can still use the refresh button to reset the timer to start the 10-minute countdown again. Any email sent to the address will show up automatically on the same page. You can read them, click on links and even reply to them, just like what you normally do to emails in your regular email client.

When you are done with it, you can just close out the page or simply wait it out. After it expires, the email address will be no longer valid. Emails sent to that address will all get bounced back with the following messages.

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

[email protected]

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain mvrht.com by mail.digitalsanctuary.com. [174.37.94.132].

The error that the other server returned was:
550 5.1.1 <[email protected]>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual alias table

It’s truly an awesome service. Highly recommended.

On the 10-Minute Mail website’s About page, the author of the service, Devon Hillard, shared a bit of more background why he created 10-Minute Mail website.

When I launched 10minutemail.com, tons of forum admins decried the idea. They screamed that it would let spammers on to their forums, and that they wouldn’t sell e-mail lists to spammers, etc…

A month goes by, and let’s see what we have. My server used to get around 200-300 e-mail a day. In the past week it averaged 60,000-70,000 e-mail a day. Virtually all of those were to old (expired) 10minutemail.com accounts. Presumably virtually all spam.

70,000 a day!? This proves that the average person simply CAN’T trust a random site or forum with their real e-mail address. Are there some forums/sites that are trustworthy? Sure! Does the average net user have any ability to tell with certainty if a given site or forum will sell their e-mail address or spam them direction? Unfortunately not.

This drives home the importance of the service.

Indeed, let’s kill the spams.