5 best temporary mail services: personal experience

Making a temporary mail service truly comfortable for yourself is not an easy task. It would seem that it is difficult: I googled the request "temporary mail", got a bunch of sites in the SERP, chose a mailbox and went on to the Internet about my business. But when there is a need to use temporary mail more often than once a year, it is better to choose such a site more carefully. I share my experience in the form of a rating of 5 temporary mail services that I used.

What is temporary mail?

Temporary mail is a service that provides the user with a mailbox address on his site for a certain period. It usually burns out on its own after a few minutes. But, looking ahead, I will say that sites have already appeared on which it is stored for several days.



To create such a mail, you need to go to the service provider's website and click the "Get" button. In general, each temporary mail site providesconvenient service where you do not need to waste time on registration and fill in several fields with your data. I just went to the site, created an address and entered it on the desired site to start a correspondence. To disable such mail, just close the tab in the browser or wait 10 minutes.

Cases where temporary mail might come in handy

1. Spam protection. It is better to use such a mailbox to register on any unreliable site - for example, to give it to the WiFi network provider at the airport (not very important in quarantine, of course, but sooner or later such a life hack will definitely be useful to someone) or any potential spammer and lover sales.
2. Gain access to a free course or program. I tried to extend access to trial versions of IQBuzz and PressIndex using a temporary mail, and when I finally opted for one of them (it was IQBuzz, who cares), I registered the only software I needed to my main mail. In general, since then I have been testing everything on temporary mail.
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I decided to compare sites of temporary mail according to the criteria that turned out to be important and defining for me. In parentheses, I note that each of these services meets the required minimum to get the definition of "temporary mail", but the first four had to be abandoned due to their shortcomings (all the details below). If there is a need to compare these sites by some other criterion, let me know in the comments, I will briefly describe. I can't say anything about other services, because I haven't tried it.

Temp-Mail.org

Once upon a time I needed a temporary mail for the first time, this service was for a long time the only and one of the best, but then the guys were swallowed up by advertising. Useful features fell off one by one: the function of selecting multiple domains stopped working, the mailbox began to freeze, and in general the site now looks very suspicious for Google.







Strengths are the presence of browser plugins and the display of the temporary mail API. It is also convenient that even if you close the tab and return to the site after a few minutes, you still see your temporary email address. This is convenient primarily because by clicking links in your temporary mail, you do not open a window in a new tab, but remain in the same one. Plus, there is a QR code to switch to view the box from your smartphone. But, to be honest, the convenience is relative, because now you have to pass the test of captchas before each new action.



The disadvantages of the service are a bunch of advertisements and cross-links. The site is so overloaded with this garbage that it looks like a spam basket, where all emails are open at the same time. And the funniest thing about all of this is that even the temporary mailbox itself receives automatic spam! In general, now the site is completely unsuitable for temporary mail and for any purpose, unfortunately.

TempMail.Plus

At the moment, I am actively using this particular service. It contains the best that I have seen from others - and all without water and advertising.







What I like:

It is possible to save all letters and the mailbox itself for a week.



You can put a pin code and even create a secret mailing address that will help keep the name of the main mailbox secret.



You can write a letter yourself or manually delete all letters.



The mailbox name can be entered manually or you can ask the service to come up with it by accident.



One small, but decisive detail - of all the temporary mail services that I have used, only the developers of TempMail Plus have come up with an ingeniously simple: any link that comes to a temporary mail opens in a new, and not the same tab.



After months of going back and looking for tabs in History, this turns out to be so convenient!



What's wrong: the site is clearly new and the design looks half baked. Plus, from the experience of using other temporary mail sites, I suspect that such a site will not last long without advertising (although they seem to work on donations so far). Therefore, I admit that the relevance of this rating may change over time. But today TempMail.Plus for me is the most pleasant and efficient temporary mail service there is.

10minutemail.com

This email service is another classic of temporary mail. It is thanks to 10minutemail that the term “mail for 10 minutes” appeared as the main synonym for the request for “temporary mail”. But, like Temp-Mail.org, this service is slowly losing ground in comparison with other competitors on the market. Even though there are much fewer ads on it.







The main advantage of the service is its ease of use. Entering the page, you can see two fields: an advertising block, a huge timer counting down 10 minutes in reverse order, and a field for a ready-made address and a temporary mailbox. I went in and everything was ready.



However, with the increasing number of offers on the market, the life of mail, which lasts only 10 minutes, is not enough. You either have to keep the tab always open, or regularly press the button “give me another 10 minutes” (which, by the way, is possible only 10 times). Plus, in the case of my registration at PressIndex, the temporary mail failed - in 10 minutes not a single letter came to the mailbox. And once you refresh the tab, you lose your mail forever. Therefore, in practice, such mail actually turns out to be one-time and not adapted to long-term correspondence.

tempinbox.xyz

Tempinbox is a relative newcomer to the market, and therefore looks much more attractive than many other temporary mail services. I have been using it for a very long time, and I recommend starting testing from this site, and not from the first two - even if temporary mail is needed for a very quick and trivial matter.







The main convenience of tempinbox is the emphasis on maximum customization of the process of creating a temporary box. In more detail, the site has two main ways to create mail. First: click the Random button and access a randomly generated mail service. Second: to get a little confused and choose your own e-mail ID and domain - all the more, the choice is interesting: from the banal fakemyinbox.com to the more serious fitschool.space. Also on the main minimum of advertising, which after 10minutemail and Temp-Mail looks like a breath of fresh air.



The main drawback of the site: although the address of a temporary mailbox is assigned to the user forever (read: until the lifetime of the domain for which he is registered), the letters themselves on it disappear automatically after 24 hours. Therefore, it will no longer be possible to return to something important (like a password for an account) on this service. In my case, the letters self-destructed after just a couple of seconds. And when I needed a password for the account I created yesterday, it became clear that tempinbox was no longer suitable for me.

Guerrillamail.com

I tried switching over to Guerrilla Mail. After reading the positive reviews, I realized that it is packed with a bunch of useful features - but in practice there are so many of them that nothing works well.







In general, I am very impressed with the design and UX of the site. The temporary mailbox already contains a letter with instructions on how to use the service. The mail is updated every 10 seconds, and there are 11 domains to choose from. Also, the site has a separate “Send” tab, which is especially convenient for conducting personal correspondence.



But for me, Guerrilla Mail turned out to be completely inconvenient. Letters are stored on the mailbox for only an hour - which is less even in comparison with the same tempinbox. It is not yet very convenient to copy the address of the generated mail - you have to look for it in the letter with instructions. Yes, and letters reach this mailbox with interruptions.



Thanks for your attention. Hope was helpful.