As you probably are aware of Mailinator is a fantastic useful service which allows you to use any email address on the fly when needed. Simply make a random one up e.g. like CoolService@Mailinator.com and start using it without previous registration.
This is great for registering on websites where you really only want to get in once and perhaps do not want to visit ever again, but still are forced to validate your email address. It may also be useful for sites which you do not trust sufficiently to provide them with your real email address at the risk of being spammed.
Mailinator also started supporting alternate domains (even alternate inbox names) instead of mailinator.com since some websites started blocking registrations using it. The fact that you have to work around such nuisance before using a site obviously shows that something is not right on the site, but that is for another post…
Today, while reading about importing a GEDCOM file into my genealogical tree at Geni, I stumbled on this little Gmail trick which I tried and it worked flawlessly.
Apparently you can add a “.” (dot) somewhere within your Gmail username, or even append a “+” (plus) along with additional characters, and it will all reach your inbox. A few examples will make it more clear. Let us suppose that your email address is RickDangerous@Gmail.com:
- Rick.Dangerous@Gmail.com
- Ri.ckDangerous@Gmail.com
- RickDangerous+IsCool@Gmail.com
In the above cases all recipients would be valid and emails sent to any of them will be received by the same person, namely the owner of RickDangerous@Gmail.com.
This is not exactly Mailinator but it allows you to use different email addresses but without the hassle of having to set them up beforehand. As an additional benefit those emails received will be kept totally private in your inbox versus Mailinator where anyone that knows the email address will be able to read them.