Show HN: MiniMail – Disposable Email Service for Everyone | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MiniMail – Disposable Email Service for Everyone

minimail.eu.org

88 pointszenull53 comments

The biggest problem with these services is they never last. It's easy to set up something like this, but there are so many of these services and so few non-technical people understand the need/purpose of them, they don't get the traction required to be viable and disappear, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle for the overall "disposable email" sector as folks realize that you can't trust any of these services to stick around...

The "disposable" in "disposable email" implies that you don't intend on keeping the address around. Under that use case, the service disappearing after a year or two doesn't cause any issues, because you don't have anything persistent attached to those emails in the first place. Besides, many (most?) other email services prevent you from recovering an email address (usually because a random address is assigned to you and there's no way to pick/recover a previous address), so you're already discouraged from using them for any persistent services.

The emails are disposable, not the service. This causes issues b/c you're constantly having to find and change providers.

Eh, I don't know if that's really a problem. Query "10 minute mail" in Google gives hundreds of results within a millisecond, so... you do this lookup once in 2 years and you're done? Really don't feel like it's a big deal, at least for me

Lots of websites are wise about disposable email and reject those domains. Query "10 minute mail" and you get a list of blacklisted email domains.

The services that new or don't have much traction aren't blocked yet.

Yes, that's precisely why I'm querying more often than bookmarking sites. They "expire" soon so I kinda have to find replacements. Apple's situation is interesting, I don't think sites can ban Apple's iCloud completely. It may also be an opportunity for Gmail to copy the feature..

They’re disposable. The whole service is disposable. That’s the whole point.

This isn’t a redirect to your existing email a-la-iCloud+ “Hide My Email”. You close the tab and the address is gone.

https://boun.cr/ has been active for years and I use it regularly on shady sites.

Do you have something similar for telephone numbers? (Often required to receive verification codes in text messages).

Search for "receive sms online"

Sorry for the "lmgtfy" type of answer, but I generally do that search then pick a site at random.

Whenever I try that, the number doesn't work. I either get an error message that the number isn't valid, or the text never arrives.

I think I tried with it with Twitter, Instagram and Google (when they asked me for a phone number and I didn't want to give my real one); this was about two years ago. Does anyone have better results?

When it comes to big providers like them you can assume that all numbers are either used by other people already or blocked.

If you just don't want to give out your number you could get a second one? Nowadays with eSim it should be easy to get a "pay as you go" number and only ever receive sms.

I eventually did get a second number and was still blocked by Instagram. Perhaps it was because of earlier attempts with temp phone numbers (I didn’t use VPN). But I don’t know for sure. I gave up after that.

For that, I would just recommend 5sim or smspva, personally used them, pretty solid.

As long as you expect to only use the number once then they should be fine.

It's good too that they tend to change because they'll soon get blocked for signups.

Like bugmenot accounts that only last a day or so.

Services tend to be blocked when they get abused by spammers. So if you want something like this to last, it would make sense to heavily leverage either plain old CAPTCHA's or the newer privacy-preserving "proofs of human presence".

Mailsac had been around for 10 years.

To be fair, Mailinator https://www.mailinator.com has been around since it's inception in 2003. It offers other services now, but the "disposable email" part is still there as it was from the start.

Similarly spamgourmet has been around since 2001 and other than some brief outages (around the time the founder was sadly struggling with a terminal illness and figuring out succession plans) it's doing fine.

Mailinator addresses, and other "disposable" email service addresses, are often rejected by sites that ask for an email address to create an account.

There's sort of a race condition between how quickly new "anonymous" email services appear and how quickly they are banned by other sites.

Then just use temp-mail.org, they rotate domains very frequently, they have been around for some time now as well.

Sneakemail.com remains online 22+ years on.

Also they quickly get added to black lists so sites wont accept them to register an account.

https://www.guerrillamail.com/ has been around as long as I can remember.

For those wondering about the domain it's a service called EU.org which allows for free domain names (since 1996!)

https://nic.eu.org/

*subdomain

Sure, but how long until the sites that require an email to set up a new account add this to their list of blocked providers (or just switch to requiring a sms number like some of the bigger sites already do)?

Or ar least I'm assuming that's a primary use case for something like this.

As someone who used Mailinator for a long time, the world can always use more of these services - what’s unfortunate is that it’s an arms race. As domains are known to be fronts for disposable emails, they just get blocked. Apple’s hide my email is great because they cannot block iCloud, and it would be great if Google or Microsoft offered similar services.

Just to remind folks Apple provides this service for all iOS devices automatically.

Not quite true. Hide My Email is included in iCloud+, which is a paid subscription service.

Free for services that use Sign in with Apple. Need iCloud+ for generating addresses outside of that.

Also, 99 cents a month for the cheapest plan isn’t too bad for everything it gives you. If you’re in the iOS/Apple ecosystem, it’s a worthwhile purchase.

iCloud+ is extremely affordable at $1/mo, tho. It's- sort of like free. And you get 50GB storage as part of that $1 plan.

Apple provides a disposable email? AFAIK it provides a forwarding address, which is similar but distinct from what this is.

Afaik it's bit more complex than a forwarding address as it allows replies from the user behind too (while still being protected) [1][2]

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sign_in_with_apple...

[2] https://support.apple.com/guide/mail/use-hide-my-email-mlhl4...

It's created automatically (or manually) for any email prompt. It is automatically set for the domain so fill in provides the forward address automatically. You can turn this off and you can delete the forward address anytime you want.

What else would one need from a disposable email?

A disposable email in the form provided by this service, the emails essentially go into a black void. They don't go to your normal inbox like the ones provided by Apple do.

It's a subtle difference.

Duckduckgo [0] as well.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/email/

that leads to a prompt to install a browser addon (for me).. this might be helpful https://duckduckgo.com/email/faq

nice! heres my similar project

- https://wumbo.co - https://addons.mozilla.org/lt/firefox/addon/wumbo/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wumbo/edkhadeemcop...

feel free to use any of that for inspiration or reach out if u wanna bounce around any ideas

https://www.paced.email and https://www.vend.email are two services that I developed that provide "disposable" email addresses.

Paced Email is a productivity tool with the ability to add team members, rules, etc and paces your mail into regular digests.

Vend Email is similar to Firefox Relay but has the added benefit of email forwarder transferability to other users.

I wish those many disposable email service would opensource. Running my own would be the best. I built one a long time ago that was getting emails piped to but it was cpanel and by no means a generic email service I could deploy anywhere

If you are a fastmail user, they provide a similar option. You can create masked email on @fastmail.com that redirect to your inbox and then delete it when you are done.

Anyone have a good self-hosted version of this? I’d like disposable email addresses that won’t get added to block lists.

I don't know one, but if you have Apple devices, Hide My Email may be a nice effort-free solution for you:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210425

No one would dare block @icloud.com.

Also have you consider plus addresses or . addresses ("." is preferred if your email provider supports it -- harder to assume that you can just remove the dots for downstream spammers).

[EDIT] Did some quick searching, and the F/OSS community has delivered! There are at least two you could use:

- https://github.com/JoeBiellik/pleasenospam

- https://github.com/haydenwoodhead/burner.kiwi

if you're using google apps (bring on the downvotes, for good reason tbh) then this is just email aliasing / fwding.

Point being that I image many mail providers offer such a thing

I run a small digitalocean instance with just postfix running on it that forwards to my real email address at gmail, using aliases. It takes me under 15 seconds to log in, create a new aliases, and run 'newaliases'. This way I can keep aliases around that are important and when they start spamming, just go delete it until I need it again.

If you're considering running postfix, IMO you should consider running maddy/chasquid instead:

https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy

https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/

They're simpler, and maddy (at least) has an S3 backend now.

Isn't it easier to just catch-all and blacklist the spamming ones?

I made one (running on catcher.mx.ax) available here https://github.com/jawr/catcher not much in the way of documentation I’m afraid :(

AnonAddy https://github.com/anonaddy/docker

Alternatively just set up catch-all on your existing email for the domain, no extra apps needed.

Try my project @ https://pretzelbox.cc.

Here's a video demo of the inbox for your domain @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyBIpO5VkLk

MiniMail does feel like this: https://github.com/synox/disposable-mailbox

Personally I just do:

A domain + Cloudflare Email Forwarding (with catch-all)

A domain + Catch-all on my GSuite (or Workspace, whatever it's called now...) subscription

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