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Comment by taytus | Hacker News Reader

My first thought was: Bye bye mailinator.com

> My first thought was: Bye bye mailinator.com

Mailinator can be pretty hard to use, since so many sites can detect the addresses and block their use.

I've pretty much given up on it, and use Fastmail's very easy aliasing features with my domain. It's not quite as private, but it's a lot more reliable.

If I recall correctly, mailinator lets you host your own DNS record that sends mail to them. While I have never had any problems, back in the day I had nospam.jrock.us forward to mailinator and that worked every time.

The truly clever programmer could open an SMTP session to the mail exchangers specified in your email address, and reject you because they point to mailinator. I know of 0 programmers in the world that have written this code. I think you could ask the vast majority of programmers that work with email addresses and dark patterns to do this, and they wouldn't even know how. So you're probably pretty safe.

I use mailinator all the time and I have never had a problem, however, which is why I don't even have the MX records to host my own anymore.

> If I recall correctly, mailinator lets you host your own DNS record that sends mail to them.

While I'm sure that works. The main reason I'd use mailinator is for privacy (i.e. not exposing anything associated to me). If I have to use my domain, rather than their free ones, I'm still identifying my domain, so I might as well use my own aliases with my own mail system.

Domains are cheap, and mailinator really ought to register and discard a bunch of $1 specials on a regular basis.

As if everybody uses Apple.

what is the need to have such a knee jerk reply? Seriously, why would you say something like that?

My comment meant: "Bye bye " for me. As in: I'm not using it anymore.

I don't get you man.

I'm not the commenter. But taken at face value, your comment could be either bye bye mailinator.com (I'm not using you anymore) or bye bye mailinator.com (no one is going to use you anymore). Fwiw, I thought you meant the latter until I read your reply.

Thank you. I can see that. But if anyone really is curious about the meaning and needs clarification, I believe it’s best to ask.

I would have never thought you meant the former. I believe it’s better to be more clear and evident in your writing.

Same here.

The knee jerk comment is yours. 'Bye Bye Mailinator' is too short to convey anything useful other than the general case, that you believe that you or those that use Apple will defect from Mailinator in droves. The typical use case for Mailinator and the overlap between the Apple eco-system as well as the fact that they specialize in this and that for Apple it is 'just another feature' makes me question whether or not you have thought through the ambiguity in your comment, by taking the most probably meaning and responding to that you have a chance to clarify your position.

I use mailinator to have some privacy from my email provider.

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