Why You Should Use Mailinator

This will tickle your revenge funnybone:

Mailinator is a service for receiving email pseudo-anonymously. The idea is that when you register for something on the Web, they always ask you for an email address, right? So then you get the benefit of whatever "free" thing you signed up for, at the cost of having yet another mailbox overflow with the resulting Torrent O' Spam.

Mailinator lets you supply a guaranteed-valid email address; you just make it up on the spot, like lupus@mailinator.com or fnord@mailinator.com or try-and-spam-me-NOW-you-jerkwads@mailinator.com.

So the site sends email to that address. Mailinator's server accepts it, creating an "acccount" on the spot when the email arrives. To view it, you just go to mailinator.com and enter the email (e.g., lupus). Voila, your confirmation email from the spamatronic site is there, you click the link or copy the secret key or whatever, they're satisfied that the email is valid, and they open the floodgates for spam to that address.

Which Mailinator keeps for maybe a day, and dumps. Because they don't care.

You would never use this service for a real email account, because there's absolutely no security whatsoever. Anyone who guesses "lupus" can read all the mail for lupus@mailinator.com. And the mail is dumped after some short period, which is up to the Mailinator's adminstrators but would never be long enough for real email.

But you don't care!

Why is Mailinator there? Two reasons. One is because Paul Tyma Is A Good Guy. The second is that Paul Tyma Gets Mad Really Good, and he was royally pissed off at getting spammed whenever he registered for anything. So he set it up, and then he opened it to anyone (see Reason #1).

Thanks, Paul.