15 Minute Mail Blog - Disposable Email Guide

Disposable email for developers: testing email flows without the mess If you build web apps, you've probably tested email flows with your own address more times than you'd like to admit. Signup confirmations, password resets, notification digests, transactional receipts. Your personal inbox ends up full of test data, and half the time you can't tell the test emails apart from the real ones. Disposable email addresses are one way to deal with this, and honestly they're easier to set up than most of the "proper" solutions. The problem with testing email using your own address Besides the inbox clutter, there are real issues: You can only test one user flow at a time with one address If your app checks for unique emails (and it should), you have to keep coming up with variations Gmail's "+" trick works for some apps but not others, some strip the suffix Shared team inboxes for testing get messy fast when multiple people run t...

How to sign up for anything online without using your real email There's a weird trade off on the internet where you can't use most things without first handing over your email address. Want to read an article? Sign up. Download a template? Sign up. Try a free tool for 30 seconds? Sign up. And every single one of those signups is another company that now has permission to email you forever. There's a pretty easy way around it though. The basic approach Instead of typing your real address into a signup form, go to 15minutemail.com and copy the temporary address that's already waiting for you. Paste that into the form instead. The confirmation email arrives in the temporary inbox, you click the link or grab the code, and you're in. Your real email never gets involved. The address expires in 15 minutes. Any follow up emails, marketing blasts, or "we miss you" reminders go nowhere. Where this works well Not every signup is the same. Here...