Ben Ramsey

Through a post over at Tom Sommer’s weblog, I found this interesting disposable e-mail service called Mailinator.

Here’s how it works: you’re filling out a form and you need an e-mail address. All you have to do is think up an @mailinator.com address, such as dude@mailinator.com, and use it. You don’t even have to go to the Mailinator Web site to sign up or create the address ahead of time. The moment Mailinator receives mail at that address, an inbox is created for it, which is cleared several hours later.

On the surface, this looks pretty cool and awesome, and it’s great for filling out on-line forms, but the problem enters when you start thinking about identity and security. If you’re signing up for a forum or some other service that sends your password to you via e-mail, using Mailinator may look appealing, but anyone could be sitting there typing in random addresses to see what’s in the inbox, and they could grab your password.

The long and the short: don’t use Mailinator when you need to receive sensitive information — and don’t use the same password for on-line banking and credit cards as you do for forums, etc.