Introducing the Mailinator Real-Time Inbox

Mailinator is changing the way email works.

For most users, an inbox is an email’s final destination on a journey through the internet. It’s an endpoint, your endpoint, that holds your emails as they come to you. Checking your email, or refreshing your browser, is when your inbox asks if there’s anything new for you.

But Mailinator doesn’t see it that way because inboxes @mailinator.com don’t really belong to anyone. The public Mailinator system gets many (oh so many) millions of emails per day - and you can read any of them. So can anyone else. With Mailinator, you don’t even have to create an inbox. You can just start sending email to it.

One way to think about it is that all inboxes already exist. Another way to think about it is that Mailinator creates inboxes on-the-fly as email arrives.

From Mailinator’s point of view the email flow is relentless and constant. We call it the Mailinator Stream. Previously, inboxes got new mail the way all inboxes do - periodically they asked the server if there was any new email to display.

But now we’ve hooked you up to the stream. Directly. To every inbox. In real time.

Welcome to the Mailinator Real-time Inbox. 

The moment someone sends an email to Mailinator, it’ll show up on your screen (just as fast as the internet allows). There’s no delay. You’ll never again have to hit ‘refresh’ on a Mailinator inbox. (Go ahead and give it at try - pick an inbox @mailinator.com, send an email to it, and watch it arrive an instant later - be sure to turn off the "undo" feature of Gmail or it'll delay 30 seconds before sending)

Now, with Mailinator’s inbox page tapped into the stream, an inbox is a filter. Everything that matches your filter will show up in real time.

For most users, that won’t make much of a difference. You’ll get your anonymous, no-sign-up emails like always, except now they'll arrive instantly. An inbox will still act like an inbox.

But paid subscribers with private domains can query the stream at a deeper level. (For those who didn't know, you can upgrade your Mailinator account to get your own private, not-auto-deleting version of Mailinator pointing at at your own domain that your whole team can access simultaneously).

Subscribers can create more complex filters and persistent queries that capture more than just a single <inbox> from the stream. You can tap into multiple inboxes at the same time. You can also use a trailing asterisk as a wildcard. Asking your inbox to capture testing* will fill your inbox with all the emails sent to testing1, and testing99, and testing-xyz, and anything else which matches.

Mailinator has always been about providing public email addresses for anyone to use (no signup required), and now it does it in real-time with some great new features. Interested in your own private Mailinator where every inbox you can think up is yours (instantly and wildcard searchable)? Request a Trial today.

Thanks for using Mailinator!