You want to create a disposable email address?
You want to remain discreet on the web and are looking for tools to create temporary email addresses?
In this article, we will present you the best tools to create ephemeral mailboxes and some practical use cases.
What is a disposable email address?
As its name suggests, a disposable email address is an email address with a limited life span, often ephemeral, and which is not intended to be used more than a few days by its user.
There are two types of disposable email addresses:
- Ephemeral email addresses that are limited in time (minutes, hours, days) but allow you to receive and consult messages received directly on the site where they were created;
- Temporary email addresses that temporarily redirect the emails received to the real email address of the user.
Depending on the tools used to create it, this type of address can be active from a few minutes to a few days or be limited in the number of transfers made if the choice of the tool used to create it works on the basis of a defined number of temporary transfers to its real email address.
How it work?
If you are wondering how to create a disposable email address, you should know that there are dozens of free online services that will allow you to create one in just a few minutes, all anonymously. Here is a selection of the 3 best tools.
tempo-email, free online service to create temporary or disposable email addresses
Tempo-email is a free and open source online solution that allows you to create a temporary email in seconds. The site is very easy to use.
To create a temporary email with Tempo-email, just click in Change next to Refresh to chose the name of the disposable email address you want to create and then click on "View Inbox" to access the just created temporary mailbox.
If you think you have received emails on this new address but nothing is displayed, just click on "Reload" to reload the list of received emails.
This service is 100% free and almost ad-free, it's undoubtedly the best free online service of its kind in our opinion.
An ephemeral email address, what can it be used for?
If you want to create an ephemeral email address, chances are you already have an idea of what you want to use it for.
This type of email address can be really useful in many cases, here are some of them.
1- Get online quotes from competitors while remaining undetectable
What better way to benchmark your competitors' prices than to contact them by email and ask for a quote for their service? The problem is that by using your personal or company email address, you will be quickly identified. With a temporary email address, you can make a price study and quotes online incognito.
2- Create social network profiles without disclosing your real email address
When you create a profile on social networks, you are systematically asked for an email address but in reality, once you have logged in and validated your account (email validation is often required now), you will receive dozens of emails every day to encourage you to return to the social network in question. If you have several accounts, you can quickly find yourself having to deal with dozens of unwanted emails every day.
To avoid having to deal with all these emails or having to unsubscribe from all these alerts, having a temporary email address will allow you to avoid being spammed and especially not to pollute your main mailbox.
However, we recommend that you do not use a temporary email address for your main personal social accounts because in case of a problem accessing your account or hacking your account, it will be impossible to recover it.
3- Create accounts on third party sites without risking being spammed with their commercial emails
Just like social networks, many sites require you to register in order to access free content, a free white paper, a free video training or a promo code.
To avoid receiving too many commercial emails or solicitations after getting what you were looking for, opting for a disposable email in this case can again save you time processing emails.
4- Get price estimates that require adding an email address
Many online quote services or online price comparison services require the addition of an email address in order to view price estimates or get the results of an online quote. Opting for the use of a disposable email address will allow you to obtain the desired information without the risk of being contacted again later.
When not to use a disposable email address?
If you create an account on a site that asks you for personal data and you are obliged to provide your real contact details, we advise you not to use a disposable email address which will be less secure than a standard email address, which you can secure better, as we present here for a Gmail account in particular. In this case, you might as well create a fake Gmail account for free and properly secure its access.
Being much less secure than traditional email services because most of them do not require a password to access them, disposable email accounts should not be used for services where you will share personal data.
