I don’t know about you, but I hate giving my email address to just any site because I know I’m going to get spammed. In fact, I created an email address specifically to use when a site requires email verification to access certain content. Currently, that email address contains 3620 spam emails (Ahhh!!). This is why 10minutemail.com is this week’s Wednesday Website We Love.
10minutemail.com is a free service that generates a temporary email address for 10 minutes. After that, the email address self-destructs. If you need more time, you can request 10 more minutes and the clock resets. It also creates an inbox for 10 minutes in case you need to verify an email address. And no, you don’t need to give them an email address to use their site.
This is a great tool to help you avoid spam. It’s also great when you need to provide an email address to a website you don’t entirely trust in order to view specific content.
10 Minute Mail also helps to protect your privacy. Have you ever noticed that when you search for a toaster online, you start seeing ads for toasters. This partially occurs because of cookies, but also because when you sign up for a site with your email they can start tracking your likes and dislikes, among other things. By supplying them with a generated email from 10 Minute Mail, there’s no trail leading back to you.
Remember, these addresses are purely temporary. If you need to access an email again, you can’t. If you’re setting up an account for something important, use your real email address.
A Cool Email Trick
When you sign up to a website, you can add periods anywhere within your email address and it will still be delivered to you. For example, John Smith’s email address is johnsmith@gmail.com. If he signs up to a website using john.smith@gmail.com or jo.hnsmith@gmail.com, the mail still goes to johnsmith@gmail.com. So if you’re wondering if a certain website is selling your email address to other sites, use a dot in your email. When you get spam and see that it was sent to jo.hnsmith@gmail.com, you’ll know which site sold them your email address.
