Hey Facebook -- what's with you and privacy?

People use Mailinator for lots of things, but most people use it for one surprisingly simple reason:

It takes around 4 minutes to sign-up for a junk email address (that you'll never use again) on Yahoo.

That's pretty much it. If you don't know about Mailinator, it creates inboxes when email arrives for them. So basically it takes absolutely no time whatsoever to create an "account" at Mailinator.

Mailinator is popular because it let's you do precisely the same thing as a throwaway email address you can make at any moment on Yahoo - but it saves you those 4 minutes (times the number of times in your life that you want to protect your personal email address).

People use Mailinator as one way to protect their privacy. We've all surfed away from many websites the moment they ask us to fill in personal information, and we do that because "trying their service/website/product" out is not worth giving them our personal information (where it might end-up on a spam list) and often, not even worth the 4 minutes.

It would seem that the more people who use your site the better, and so we don't really understand why some websites block mailinator.com email addresses. They're basically just pushing away customers. They are really saying to you that "we don't want you as a user/customer unless you agree to let us spam you". It's not "opt-in" - it's "force-in".

So when someone tries to sign-up for Facebook or some other website and are told that mailinator.com isn't a valid address, they're just going to get perturbed; and then spend the next 4 minutes signing-up for a Yahoo account and use that.

The website still gets absolutely zero personal information and the user still gets in. In fact, the only difference is that your new user (customer) is probably in a worse mood. And that's if they do decide to spend the 4 minutes. Maybe they decide to be someone else's customer.

As a note to our customers, if you find yourself a website that doesn't like mailinator.com (though even after more than 4 years of Mailinator, there really are very very few) - use one of the alternate domains. They're listed on Mailinator's front page (we verified that Facebook, for example, allows several of them). And don't worry, we'll keep adding more.

Or, if you prefer to waste 4 minutes to protect your privacy (and get annoyed with the website forcing you to do that), then that's fine too. There are many email services that will happily let you throw away 4 minutes of your life signing up for an address you don't really want. Any of them will do, we just used Yahoo as an example. The link's below.

Mailinator - Protect your email

Email signup at Yahoo

Mailinator Alternate Domains