A disposable email address (DEA), or temporary email address, is a one-time-use email address that does not actually forward emails to the user and usually becomes unavailable after a certain period of time. Some people sign up for these throwaway accounts so they can sign up for mailing lists to get free content without having to disclose their real email addresses.
Other reasons someone might use a temporary email address are to protect themselves from spam, to sign up for forums and online discussion groups, or to leave one-off comments on blog posts.
What is a Disposable Email Address & How to Manage (Avoid) Them
It's no secret that a robust healthy mailing list full of engaged subscribers who love your brand is the best marketing tool you can have in your arsenal. Email marketing has the highest ROI of any online marketing approach.
Building that healthy email list can be tricky. You need to make sure that every email on the list is an active and valid email address. This is where being able to detect disposable email address instances becomes very important.
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Before we dive into how to scrub your mailing list of these temporary email addresses, let's take a quick look at how a disposable email address works, and how it is different from a regular and correct email address.
There are three types of disposable email addresses: alias addresses, forwarding addresses, and non-forwarding addresses.
An alias address is simply another email address set up under the user's primary domain, and any emails sent to this alias are filtered into a separate folder from the user's primary inbox folder. Because they are managed by popular domains like Gmail, these still technically count as "real" addresses.
Beginner's Guide to Disposable Email Addresses
A forwarding address is a separate email address set up under a different domain, which forwards emails to the user's primary account. The user might then apply to filter to manage incoming messages from their forwarding address.
A non-forwarding address is what we'll be discussing in this article. It's a temporary email address, handled by a company specifically set up to provide disposable email addresses to users. The address does not forward emails to the recipient's inbox and usually disappears after a certain amount of time.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of Using Disposable Email Addresses
From a consumer standpoint, it's easy to see why a disposable email address is attractive: today's inboxes are full of spam and unread emails. If you are worried about spam, a disposable email address is a good safety net for avoiding it.
Another benefit for the consumer using a disposable email address is protecting personal information. If a company you signed up with gets hacked, you won't have to worry about bad actors getting their hands on your real email address.
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Finally, if all you want to do is leave a comment on a blog post, or get the free eBook offered for signing up for a mailing list, using a disposable email address to do this makes sense.
On the other hand, using a disposable email address might lead to missing important emails, which will not be forwarded to your main mail server.
Temp MailHow to Detect Disposable Email Addresses
It's not always easy to detect disposable emails. There are dozens of existing disposable email domain names, and more are being added every day. Keeping track of the list of disposable domains is a near-impossible task.
The only real way to detect disposable emails is to monitor the inboxes of those addresses and perform periodic audits to assess their deliverability of them. But again, this is a time-consuming task.
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For this reason, most companies turn to online services to handle disposable email address detection for them. Services like NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, AbstractAPI, and others can help you detect temporary email addresses so they don't pollute your list.
Let's take a look at how you can use AbstractAPI's Free Email Verification API to perform disposable email address detection and ensure that your mailing list is made up of only valid email addresses.
Using the API to Detect an Incoming Temporary Email Address
Using the API to Detect an Incoming Temporary Email Address
AbstractAPI exposes a REST endpoint that you can use in your online forms to perform real-time email validation and prevent fake emails from ending up on your list in the first place. Simply make a call to the API when the user inputs their email address, and you'll get a response telling you whether the email is real, valid, and active.
Get Started With the API
To use the Abstract Free Email Validation API, you'll have to sign up for an account and get an API key. The account is free for life. The API key authenticates you with the API and allows you to make requests.
Go to the home page and click "Get Started"
After you sign up, you'll be taken to the API dashboard, where you'll see your API key.
Send a Test Email Validation Request to the API
Choose your preferred language in the testing sandbox. For example, Javascript. You'll see a block of code that you can copy and paste into your own app or web form.
All of these fields are important in detecting invalid emails. For this article, you can just look at the is_free_email and is_disposable_email fields. These will tell you whether or not the email is for a fake inbox.
AbstractAPI maintains thorough records of known disposable emails and continuously updates its database when new ones are discovered.
What are the risks of using disposable email addresses?
For the user, the risk of using a disposable email address is that you may end up missing important emails, which won't be delivered to your actual inbox. For businesses, disposable email addresses can hurt deliverability and increase bounce rates, leading to damage to your sender reputation.
Can email validation services detect all disposable email addresses?
Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to detect all disposable email addresses, because there are already so many domains for disposable emails out there, and new ones are being added all the time. In addition, proxy servers and VPNs make things even more complicated.
However, this doesn't mean that detecting disposable email addresses is a waste of time or not important. Email validation services can detect the majority of disposable email addresses, and using them will improve your deliverability score and decrease bounce rates.
Everyone uses email today, for everything from communicating with friends and colleagues to using your email address as your online passport. Nearly every app and service you signup for today requires an email address, as do most loyalty cards, contest entries, and more.
It's nice to have one address for everything, but getting dozens of email messages each day that you really don't want isn't nice. Plus, it's far from uncommon for stores to have their databases hacked these days, leaving your email address all the more likely to end up on spam lists. Then, there's the fact that it's nearly impossible to do anything 100% privately.
There's a number of ways to tame your Gmail and Outlook inboxes, but sometimes you need something more drastic: a disposable email address.
Solutions range from straightforward Yahoo disposable email addresses, to simple Gmail tweaks on your main email address to make filtering easier, to a 100% anonymous email address. Disposable email address are a great way to bring back some of the privacy of paper letters and help you keep your inbox tidier by default.
how to create a disposable email address and use it
How to create disposable email addresses and begin using them. (graphic source)
Before you dive into this tutorial, download our new eBook (for FREE): The Ultimate Guide to Inbox Zero Mastery. It's packed with a number of additional professional email strategies to help you organize your email inbox right.
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In this tutorial, I'll show you everything you need to know about disposable email addresses, and how to to start using disposable email addresses in multiple popular emails systems like Gmail, Yahoo, Mailinator, and more.
Let's start by explaining what a disposable email address is.
Nearly every service requires you to provide an email address. Yet, the problem of spam and unwanted email messages is increasing. Every time you provide your email address, you increase the likelihood of receiving even more spam if the company you provide your information to is hacked or sells your email address. Also, numerous users of disposable email addresses are concerned with privacy as much as spam.
Disposable email addresses can help solve the problem. By providing a different email address each time you sign up for services and keeping a record of those unique email addresses, you can tell how your information is getting to spammers.
Many disposable email addresses forward messages to your real email address. A few disposable email services make the disposable email only available for a short time.
Why Would I Use a Disposable Email Address?
Temp MailThe idea of disposable email address conjures up images of black hat hackers and the underworld of the internet that most of us steer away from. But there are a number of legitimate reasons you might want a disposable email address—reasons many on our Tuts+ team use them regularly. Here's a few:
You want to signup for a store loyalty card, but would rather not get emails from the store advertising new products. Use a disposable email address instead, and you'll never have to see those emails—and if the store gets hacked, your real email address won't get stolen.
You just coded an awesome web app, and want to test it thoroughly before releasing it to the wild. Get 100 disposable email addresses, use them for dummy accounts, and test away.
You want to signup for another account with a web app—perhaps you want another IFTTT account to automate a second Twitter account you run for your site. Both of those will require a different email from your default, so rather than managing another email inbox, just use a disposable email address.
You want to write a fully anonymous email to the editor of a newspaper. With paper mail, you could do this by mailing a letter without a return address from a postal drop box, but using a throwaway email address is one of the few ways to do so online today.
That's only a few of the many reasons you might consider using a disposable email address. Now, here's the apps and tips you'll need to create disposable email addresses and start using them.
How to Create a Disposable Email Address and Begin Using It
How to Create a Disposable Email Address and Begin Using It
The most obvious way to create a disposable email address would be to make a new email account with Gmail, Yahoo, or any other free email service, but that's a lot of trouble for just one new email address. It'd work if you'd like one email you give away to companies, and another you use for personal communications, but if you want more accounts than that, disposable email addresses are a better option.
Here's some of the best ways to make disposable, temporary, or throwaway email addresses and how to start using them in seven popular email systems:
1. Gmail - Generate Temporary Email Address Aliases
Ever wanted to know who actually gave away your email address when you notice spam showing up in your inbox? Now you can, with custom email addresses in Gmail. Gmail doesn't offer anonymous disposable email addresses, but you can add a period anywhere in your email address, or append a plus sign to the end of your email and add any text you want after it to make a new email alias.
For example, if you were signing up for MegaCorp, Inc.'s newsletter, don't enter my.name123@gmail.com. Instead, add a plus to the end of your email and type whatever you want after it. For example, you could send an email to my.name123+megacorp@gmail.com or my.name123+456789@gmail.com.
Now, when spam mail comes, click the tiny down arrow next to To me:. It will display where the email is from, and whom it was sent to, along with other details. You can then see which email alias it was sent to. So, if you receive a promotional offer about toys and you look at who it was sent to and see my.name12.3+megacorp@gmail.com, you know who gave away your email address. The +megacorp tells you that the MegaCorp, Inc. newsletter gave away your email address. Time to unsubscribe!
Gmail Disposable Email Address
Receiving mail with a Gmail disposable email address.
These same email aliases give you a great way to automatically filter your incoming emails, even if the services you sign up for don't spam you. You could setup custom Gmail filters for each of your email aliases, and have emails from those addresses automatically archived with particular labels.