A service which I recently stumbled upon, Mailinator, allows you to use a temporary e-mail address to sign up for any services and receive their confirmation mail. No registration hassle. No maintaining a “throwaway” account. Just use and discard. Or as the military types say, fire and forget.

How do you use this amazing service? Say you’ve just come to a site which has a dubious privacy policy but requires your e-mail address during the registration process. Just use a random e-mail address at their domain (eg. wonkeywackywatercloset@mailinator.com, asdfkjasdfklj@mailinator.com, use your imagination!) and continue with the registration process. To retrieve the confirmation e-mail, just go to www.mailinator.com and enter the address you used into the “Check your inbox” text box and click on “Go”. No prior sign-up is required. This should bring you to the inbox containing the confirmation letter from your registration. Do what you need to, and then just forget about the account. It’s as simple as that, and everything is totally anonymous. Can’t think of a e-mail address to use? Just go to the the Mailinator page and use the randomly generated e-mail address.

One other advantage of using this service over keeping a reusable “throwaway” e-mail account is that the paranoids amongst us can use a different e-mail address everytime, thus removing even the minute possibility that our Internet use habits can be tracked via a common e-mail address.

However, bear in mind that the service requires no authentication, meaning that it is possible for someone else to stumble into your e-mail account (think johndoe@mailinator.com), allowing them to view your e-mails and even potentially break into the accounts which you have applied for using the Mailinator address. Unless you use a truly unique e-mail address, pretty much anyone would be able to retrieve the e-mails. My advice? Use the randomly generated addresses at the site itself. That should prevent anyone from accidentally or deliberately getting your e-mails until the site automatically deletes it after a few hours. As with many things, a little prudence will go a long way to ensure safe and happy use of the service.