You’ve been signing up for internet services ever since you bought a connection, most of which were nothing more than a one-time thing. Those one-time things, though, still end up flooding your email’s inbox with promotional messages which either stay there forever or if you’re not a procrastinator like me, force you to unsubscribe or block manually. No, I’m not here to nag you (again) but to actually tell you there’s a better way to avoid this mess.
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What is a Disposable Email?
Disposable emails. Yes, you can create email addresses with a click of a button that come with no strings attached and let you join various services without spamming your primary account. Once when you are done, you can easily dump them as well. Some of them can be configured to remain permanent and some of them are designed solely for the purpose of accessing a bit of information that requires a user account.
To understand the difference between the type of email account you employ every day and disposable ones, here’s a scenario. You’re researching for a project and one of the websites which could potentially help you with that restricts its content for registered users. You know you won’t be visiting it again and signing up with your own email account can lead to unnecessary spam. That’s where an expendable email comes in. You build a new one in seconds, input that on the website, access the articles you need, and never look back. Simple.
Now, you might be thinking the majority of websites need confirmation. Well, that’s not a worry either since those burner accounts also create a temporary inbox for you which automatically expires in a few days. It’s really just all there set up for you to get started, honestly. Hence, here are three best options, all of which have a slightly different approach.
The Best Disposable Email Services
Slippery Email
Slippery Email is what a textbook disposable email tool looks like. It allows you to create a new account with a single click, zero questions asked. Slippery Email also offers a mailbox which retains messages for eight days and post that, it’s gone. The app doesn’t have any hidden, additional fee or advertisements. Its interface has been similarly kept straightforward with your randomly generated address on the left with a nifty copy button and emails to the right of that. To sign up on Slippery Email, head over to this page, click the “Hook me up”, and you’re all set.
Burner Emails
Burner Emails is a significantly more advanced platform and in my opinion, what most users would be interested in. For starters, there’s no temporary mailbox here. Burner Emails hooks up to your own email address and forwards the messages’ from whichever website you’ve signed up on. That might sound a little counterproductive but hear me out.
Burner Emails does so with sheer brilliance. The first thing you should know is that it generates a new email address for every website you want a temporary account on. What this does is let you specifically select the service you’d like to stop receiving emails from through a simple switch. Burner Emails, instead of a web app, comes with a Chrome or Firefox extension using which you easily start or pause messages from any particular business. The extension plays a critical role here as whenever you encounter an email address field, a little Burner Emails icon will show up letting you create a new email address in a jiffy. Burner Emails is entirely free of cost as well and you can download it from the links down below.
Burner Emails Chrome Extension
The Gmail Way
If you’re not okay with configuring third-party solutions, you can do it on Gmail itself.
Yes, building a disposable email account is sort of possible on Gmail but it requires some work on your part as well. The way to do this is to use aliases. You see, you can append anything in the front of your Gmail address followed by the plus sign and it will still direct to your inbox. Once you’ve settled on the alias, you can simply set up a filter that throws every email addressed to that ID straight into the trash. Here’s how to do it,
- First, pick an alias. For instance, I’ll go with “spam”. Therefore, my disposable email address is “spam+shubham@gmail.com”.
- Next, you need to develop a filter on Gmail. To do this, head over to your Gmail inbox, click the little cogwheel icon on the top right corner, and enter settings.
- You’ll find a tab called “Filters and Blocked Addresses” there. Open it.
- Click “Create a new filter”.
- In the window, enter your disposable email address in the “To” field, and click the “create filter with this search” option.
- Now, you can choose what would you like to do with that incoming message. I would suggest checking the “Skip the inbox” and “Delete it” boxes.
- Hit “Create filter” and you’re done.
Those were the best ways to create a disposable email account. Let us know in the comments section if we missed a good one or you’re stuck at a particular step.