Spam tends to be an occupational hazard of using the internet. Everyday we receive tens or may be hundreds of spam mails, making life online unpleasant. All it takes is one rogue website to sell our email address and we will be in every spammer’s database in no time. Using temporary or disposable emails to sign up or subscribe to newsletters could help a lot in culling spam.

Today we’ll take a look at 16 web apps that provide disposable email addresses to find the best ones in this business. Jump in with me!

E4ward

E4ward is a simple and straight forward disposable email service. You can create multiple email addresses on the fly. The USP of E4ward is that it allows to use your own domain name to create spam proof email ids.

The Good: Even the reply emails sent from your own domain are masked by E4ward. You can use your own domain free of charge.

The Bad: Configuring your domain with E4ward is difficult for people who are less technical savvy.

Pricing: Free for personal use with a monthly bandwidth cap of 50 MB. Paid plans comes with extra bandwidth.

Spamex

Like Emailias, Spamex also lets you create disposable email addresses on the go with the bookmarklet.

The Good: You can create unlimited disposable email addresses. Reply emails are also masked.

The Bad: Few complaints of an unresponsive customer service.

Free Trial: Thirty days of full featured free trial.

Pricing: Paid services start from $ 9.95 per year.

ZoEmail

ZoEmail boasts itself of a service built using the patented address control technology developed by AT&T Labs. In a nutshell, the service allows you to receive emails only from those to whom you have mailed from the ZoEmail account. All other incoming mail are purged before reaching your inbox.

The Good: The service triggers very low false positives (aka. Only spam mails get booted). A fantastic web interface in par with famous email services.

The Bad: Even the paid version comes with a tiny 24MB storage. If you forget to send an email to a prospective client before giving them out your Zoemail email id, you are screwed. No free trial.

Pricing: Paid services start from $ 0.99 per month.

Emailias

Emailias helps you to create disposable email ids and and mails received are forwarded to your original address. When you choose not to receive mails from the particular address, just delete it to get rid of spam.

The Good: Works right from the browser bookmarklet. No need to login to the control panel every time you need a disposable address. Replies from your inbox are masked as well. Custom domain addresses are supported.

The Bad: The User Interface looks like it was designed in the stone age.

Free Trial: Sixty days of full featured free trial.

Pricing: Paid services start from $4.99 per month.

OtherInbox

Apart from helping you to cure your email overload, Otherinbox lets you create unlimited disposable email addresses. For a more in-depth look at Otherinbox, be sure to read our review, Put Your Email on Autopilot with OtherInbox.

The Good: Fantastic and very intuitive User Interface. All in one solution for email overload and spam control.

The Bad: Free accounts cannot access emails that are more than 30 days old.

Pricing: The service will cost you $20 to access all emails.

gishPuppy

The Good: Email IDs can be created via bookmarklets and a dedicated Firefox extension. gishPuppy remembers IDs you created for a domain and will also remind you to use them instead of creating a new one.

The Bad: No custom domain support.

Pricing: gishPuppy is a free for all service.

Mailinator

The Good: No need to sign up or login to create an email address. Allows you to create from few of their own domains if the @mailinator.com domain is blocked.

The Bad: All the mails are stored publicly. Since there is no password, anyone can guess your mail ID and access the mails.

Pricing: Mailinator is free for all.

Spamgourmet

Spamgourmet is a disposable email ID generator with a twist. You can set the number of emails that a disposable address can get while creating the id itself. For example, you can receive only 5 emails to the following ID by replacing “x” with 5 [email protected]

The Good: You can create unlimited disposable email addresses each with their own custom expiration based on mail count. Usage of Watchwords to control the misuse of your account.

The Bad: A horrible User Interface.

Pricing: The service is absolutely free for everyone. No paid plans.

myTrashMail

The Good: SSL access to login to your account. You can read the mails received via RSS feed.

The Bad: The email domains are blocked and changed often. So this really is a temporary service.

Pricing: myTrashMail is a free service.

mailexpire

The Good: Offers a fantastic tiered, time limited disposable email address creation service. Can change the expiry time of the email address at anytime.

The Bad: Have to pass through hoops like CAPTCHAs, email verifications before creating the account. Emails cannot be stored beyond 3 months.

Pricing: This is a free service.

MailEater

The Bad: Like Mailinator, all the mails are public and anyone access them by guessing the email address you have created. All mails will be automatically deleted after 4 hours. No exceptions.

Pricing: This is a free service.

Jetable

The Bad: The service is not anonymous and logs are maintained by the site. Expiry time of email addresses cannot extended like mailexpire.com

Pricing: This is a free service.

spambox

The Good: The expiry time of disposable addresses can be extended.

Pricing: This is a free service.

GuerrillaMail

The Good: You can create a random email address or a custom address.

The Bad: Though it does not reveal the subject or recipient of the mail,GuerrillaMail has a ticker displaying the latest emails received. That is a bit creepy.

Pricing: For an ad free service and to use your own domain address, you can pay the amount that you see fit (Yep. You can choose to pay what you think is the right price).

TempEMail

The Good: TempEMail offers a completely anonymous disposable email service.

The Bad: All the mails are public and anyone access them by guessing the email address you have created.

Pricing: This is a free service.

spamfree24

The Good: spamfree24 offers 5 domains to choose from when creating a disposable email address.

The Bad: A simple guess work could let anyone to access the mails you have received in the disposable email address created.

Pricing: This is a free service.

Final Thoughts

All the disposable email address providers work as advertised, protecting your original email ID from a flood of spam. However, most of them tend to have a battered user interface. Except for OtherInbox, the rest of the services are still sporting the Web 1.0 UI. Even with an outdated UI, I found Spamgourmet to be a fantastic service with a couple of dynamite features.

In the long and the short, unless you know what you are doing, please be cautious while using services that let anyone access your emails with just simple guess work.