Mailinator.com is a handy service. It is a publicly accessible anonymous email service. [email protected] is freely available for anyone to use at anytime without any logon credentials.
I frequently use it when a website that I don’t trust requires me to provide them an email address to do something. I’ll often provide them [email protected]. Then I visit https://mailinator.com/inbox.jsp?to=theirdomainname.com to complete the registration process or grab a download link I was seeking.
Naturally, some websites don’t accept @mailinator.com email addresses because they want my real email address so they can send me unwanted solicitations in the future. To get around this, Mailinator lets you use your own domain to create a DNS MX record that forwards to mail.mailinator.com. Here’s how.
You must first own your own domain from any domain name registrar. I’ll use example.com.
Second, you must be able to modify your external DNS records for your domain. Typically, the domain name registrar also offers this service, or you can use something like CloudFlare.com.
Using your external DNS service, create a new MX record using any subdomain you want. Something like spam.example.com, donotsolicit.example.com, or even mailinator.example.com.
- Type = MX
- Name = donotsolicit
- Value = mail.mailinator.com
- Priority = 50
That’s it. Now [email protected] will all forward to a matching [email protected] email address that you may retrieve at https://mailinator.com/inbox.jsp?to=everyaddressimaginable. And because this is not an @mailinator.com email address, the website you are providing this fake email address to will likely accept it.