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Comment by swongel | Hacker News Reader

You can use Mailinator to do this already, you can see all of their inboxes on their website and you can use all of their domains to bypass domain restrictions. For example I might use somethingsilly@bobmail.info and it will be redirected to https://www.mailinator.com/v3/index.jsp?zone=public&query=so...

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> You can use Mailinator to do this already

While I'm a fan of Mailinator and their approach, I think the feature OP has about auto-clicking verify is unique. But yes, to do this right, you need the multi-domain approach of Mailinator instead of just aliases. Maybe Mailinator has an API or supports POP/IMAP that would make this possible, I haven't checked.

Last I checked it appeared like Mailinator's POP3 support was completely removed, and API access requires a subscription. It was priced way above what I was willing to pay (I think $150/mo)

Also Mailinator is banned by multiple sites and I feel like that number is increasing (anecdata). Which means it's getting less and less useful for the purpose of "burner" email addresses.

You can point your own domain to mailinator mx records for free.

Don’t have a domain to throw spam at? Pick a sub domain and use that.

I used Mailinator as the quick solution to access some one time resources on websites that forced me to register. It was the simplicity of the throwaway email that made it attractive to me. But when it's blocked on a website I usually wouldn't want to bother with c more complicated setup. If the effort is justified then I can probably use a regular email address. Other people might have different use cases.

Pointing your MX records to Mailinator is a one-time small effort, then it's just a matter to sending mail to whatever@yourdomain.com.

I'm not sure if my use case was clear or perhaps I don't understand what the scenario you present does.

Say I want to comment on a news article and need to register. I don't want random-newspaper.com to have anything directly related to my person, including anything @mydomain.com. So I quickly punch in random-email@mailinator.com to register and once I'm done I can either forget the site and email ever existed or keep using it since it's non critical and losing access to it doesn't matter.

Ideally I would have different email addresses for every site so I can keep those identities separated and free of any personal information. Last time I used it like this was probably a decade ago because since then more and more sites starting rejecting @mailinator.com addresses. I found another such solution that I have been using for the past years but this is also going the same way (not a big issue yet).

service will check MX record of your email and refuse to register if it match mailinator's MX.

If the site you are trying to login in to blocks mailinator, use <whateveryouwant>@notmailinator.com

Also exists: https://mailnesia.com/

You can easily use one of many opensource self-hosted temporary email projects with APIs. Just check Github.

Receiving email is pretty easy - own domain with MX record and some cheap VPS with Docker. No need to worry SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DSBL - you care about these when you have to send emails from the host.

but the list of mailinator domains is easily looked up and blacklisted by most major sites. the op's insight is that sites won't blacklist gmail

>the op's insight is that sites won't blacklist gmail

Why would you blacklist gmail.com when you can blacklist 'GuerillaClick@gmail.com'?

well for one you also need to blacklist the aliases, ex. guerillaclick+sdf@gmail.com, and i suspect sysadmins start showing more hesitation when you need to start pattern matching (risk of false positives and additional overhead)

I don't know if it still does it, but mailinator used to have a neat feature where it would "detect" bots trying to scrape its list of domains and start injecting legit ones like hotmail.com/gmail.com

you don't need to scrape anything. you check provided email for mailinator's MX records\IPs.

This is probably much more difficult and taxing. On every signup, you're now checking MX records and IP's, not just looking at a string. And Mailinator can change this information regularly too if they choose.

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