The Web

How To Get A Self-Destructing Email Address for Temporarily Use

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 After it expires, the email address will be no longer valid.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:

g2437172@mvrht.com

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 <g2437172@mvrht.com>: 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.

edge

View Comments

  • I get three or four emails a day from mvrht.com with different numbers in front... from scammers and spammers..... thanks for the crap.....

Share
Published by
edge

Recent Posts

Disable Copilot on Windows 11 via Group Policy GPO

If using Copilot right from the Taskbar isn't your thing, you should disable it. Even…

3 weeks ago

Setting Default Fonts in Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint via Group Policy

In an environment where standardizing things does matter, setting default fonts in Microsoft Office apps…

2 months ago

Wake-On-LAN (WOL) with Windows and PowerShell

Wake-On-LAN is a networking standard that lets you wake up a computer from either a…

2 months ago

How To Remove Restrictions Set in A Password-Protected PDF File

First of all, this is not to bypass a PDF file that requires a password…

2 months ago

How To Move My Outlook Navigation Bar Back From Left Back To the Bottom

Microsoft has been lurking about the idea of placing the Outlook navigation bar to the…

1 year ago

Headset with Microphone Echoing My Own Voice on Windows, What To Do?

One colleague came up to me the other day asking me to take look at…

1 year ago