This article discusses what disposable email addresses are, their disadvantages and benefits, and we examine some examples of services that provide disposable email addresses.
What Are Disposable Email Addresses?
Disposable/temporary email addresses (DEA), also known as ‘burner’ email addresses, are (mostly free) services that allow the user to set up and generate email aliases and, in some cases, associated domain names. DEAs enable users to keep their real email addresses secret. They are temporary because, depending on the email service, the email addresses and the emails received in the inbox (and domains) are deleted within the specified brief period.
Why? A Way To Reduce Spam
There is a growing need for DEAs due to the overwhelming spam that now clogs up many email boxes. In addition to making it difficult to find important emails, spam wastes time and can be pretty frustrating. Using disposable email addresses to sign-up and receive something that a person wants means that they don’t have to receive countless more follow-up emails and offers from that company.
Benefits
Some other substantial benefits that the use of DEAs bring to the user include:
- Maintaining Privacy and Security. It is possible that some sites that users sign-up to/register with may be hacked and the email addresses (and other personal data) stolen. Using a DEA means that even if there is a hack, the user’s actual email address is not used for further attacks or sold to other hackers. Also, using a DEA offers more privacy.
- Control. Spam emails and emails from legitimate sign-ups where their marketing emails are frequent and where a user may not have time to go through and unsubscribe can mean inboxes soon fill up. DEAs provide a way to take more control.
- Ease of management and convenience. DEAs are easy and fast to set up, can be outsourced entirely, are operated from easy-to-use dashboards, don’t require extra software or hardware, and don’t interfere with a user’s existing email infrastructure.
- Identification and traceability. Setting up one disposable email address per service that a user signs up for can help identify the source of any spam by specifying the service that sells email addresses or leaks them. The associated DEA can then be deleted to stop the flow of spam.
- The ability to ‘cherry-pick.’ Using DEAs, users can sign up for the good parts of offers, e.g., rewards or special offers, and avoid the destructive features, i.e., the marketing follow-ups that are not relevant.
- The ability to test the nature of a service. Signing up for new, untried service with a DEA can allow the user to assess the nature of that service, e.g., whether they immediately send out lots of junk emails.
- Anonymity. There may be some occasions where users want to make a point, comment, or send a message of importance but, for whatever reason, remain anonymous.
- Flexibility, scope, and scalability. DEA services can offer generous or no limits on the number of disposable email addresses per account and the size of incoming and outgoing messages. The user can set up and delete email addresses for multiple services as and when required.
Disadvantages
There are, of course, some drawbacks of DEAs. These include:
- They are great for end-users but can be damaging and create work and costs for marketers. Those businesses receiving sign-ups using DEAs have difficulties converting trial customers, skewed churn-rate figures and analytics, and possible backlisting from the bounced emails sent back to DEAs that don’t exist anymore. DEAs also enable a marketer’s offers (and trust) to be abused and can mean extra wasted costs in identifying and verifying addresses and clean lists.
- Emails from a DEA service may be blacklisted so users can’t sign up for services with email addresses using their domain.
- There may be a security risk for DEA users, for example, emails passing through free services may be readable to others, and users may have access to a pool of addresses for which others can see the inbox.
Examples of DEA services include:
- GuerrillaMail – An open-source, basic looking service that allows the creation of email addresses with nine domain names. There’s no registration, and email addresses last an hour. https://www.guerrillamail.com/ .
- Air Mail – Auto-generated email address which gets changed every 10 seconds. Mailboxes are not deleted and can be used for as long as the domain is active so users can read their inbox via a browser later using a unique URL. http://getairmail.com/.
- 10 Minute Mail – Just like the name suggests. Users can set up a temporary email address and any emails sent to that address show up automatically on the web page. They can be read, clicked on, and replied to, but the mail address expires after 10 minutes. http://10minutemail.com/ .
- Mailinator – This offers a offers a 100 per cent free, public disposable email system where users can choose any address @mailinator.com (scroll down the home page to find the link). https://www.mailinator.com/.
- Email – This free service allows users to use ‘any-name-of-your-choice’@YOPmail.com, sign up anywhere, and there’s a disposable inbox where messages are kept for eight days. Users can also manually remove them. http://www.yopmail.com/.
- EmailOnDeck – Free service where temporary email addresses typically expire after more than an hour but within a day. https://www.emailondeck.com/
What Does This Mean For Your Business?
For DEA users, these email addresses can provide a low-cost (often free) way to tackle any spam and a clogged inbox and offer privacy and security benefits. However, for businesses operating their marketing, sign-ups and offer take-ups with disposable email can create real challenges, affect analytics and figures, create more work, and even lead to problems like being blacklisted. DEAs, therefore, are more beneficial to end-users than businesses/marketers. That said, it is possible to see why they have now become popular and are one of many valued spam tackling tools and services.
