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Comment by pandemicsoul | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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..

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.

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.

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".

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.

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

Sneakemail.com remains online 22+ years on.

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

Mailsac had been around for 10 years.

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