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http://10MinuteMail.com was written by me as a learning exercise. It's profitable and low maintenance.

Out of curiosity, when did you launch the site? Did you do any marketing or was it natural growth? I ask because the temporary inbox market seems pretty saturated already.

I launched it in November of 2006. The temp inbox market had several players in it already, and if I'd actually looked around at all I wouldn't have built it:) But it was just something to learn Seam and scratch my own itch, so I didn't even check to see if there was already a product in the space, much less several.

I didn't do any marketing, just mentioned it to a couple of friends. Apparently those friends know some crazy people because in ~24 hours it was on the front page of Digg, Slashdot, and Yahoo Tech.

Since that initial spike of traffic, and the settle-out afterward, it's been growing slowly but steadily ever since.

10minutemail.com is cool. Thank you. But recently it has not been working for me. Are websites catching on and blacklisting 10minutemail domains? Anyway to counter that?

By not working you mean sites won't let you register with e-mail addresses ending in lhsdv.com? Or that they do, but there's some issue with 10MinuteMail.com itself that doesn't show you the e-mail? If it's the former, then not much I can do, other than rotating domains every few months, which I do. If it's the latter, email me with an example and I'll try to fix it. devon@digitalsanctuary.com

Maybe you can have people donate their junk domains that they bought out of whim. I'm sure every HN reader probably have a few dozen domains that they let expire every year.

How does it make money? With the ads?

About 80% from ads.

10MinutesMail is a cool app. I use it a lot. Thumbs up. :)

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