Review: Mailinator v. MintEmail v. Guerrilla Mail v. Dodgeit

So after that post on Guerrilla Mail I received via various means tips to a few other services that hit the same sweet spot, namely easy read-only/temporary mailboxes that let you sign up safely and privately for sites that do email verification. The contestants as my cryptic title line put it are: Mailinator, MintEmail, Guerrilla Mail and Dodgeit. The short answer is that they all have their particular take on the subject, but I suspect that I will probably use MintEmail when I need to use something like this for its speed and convenience.

The first thing I noticed about these sites was how quickly they received the email. In my unscientific testing, Mailinator and MintEmail won this hands down with almost instantaneous receipt of the emails I sent. There was one period that I tested where it took MintEmail closer to a minute to pick it up, but all subsequent testing was fast so I’ll put that delay as a fluke. Guerrilla Mail comes in at around 20-60 seconds. Initially I thought Dodgeit didn’t work, but it turns out it was working just *very* slowly, I don’t know how long it took but it was several minutes in my tests.

The second thing is the email address you use. MintEmail, Mailinator and Dodgeit all allow you to simply pick an email address at any time (in their domain) and then you go to the site and enter the email address you’d like to check. This is loads of convenience, the alternative which is how Guerrilla Mail operates, is to first go to the site where you are given a random email address to use. It’s not much more effort, since you’ll be going to the site anyway, but it does put a little cramp in your style. The one thing that might bother some people with the pick-your-own style is that anyone can check that email address so if you pick a common email like email@ or anonymous@ I can see how that might cause some collisions of email. In the long run, though, since this is all for throwaway purposes anyway that rare case probably doesn’t bother people. In MintEmail and Mailinator’s cases you can also go to their site and pick up a random mail address as well, although Guerrilla Mail’s addresses seem to apply a better algorithm for picking pronouncable (and thus hopefully memorable random addresses).

The last thing is interface and any particular special hooks the sites have. MintEmail has the slickest interface - very simple and the best part is that it is constantly checking for new mail for you so you don’t have to sit there and refresh the page until the email arrives. It updates the title of the browser window as well, so you can notice it if you have it in a tab or something. All three others require you to reload the page, which can be a drag if it takes a little while for the email to arrive (a fault which may be out of the control of the site - the sender might be slow, the internet might be slow, etc..)

MintEmail also has the most polished look of them all, very clean design, very web2.0. It is slightly hidden on where to type in the email you picked (if you aren’t using the provided random one), you have to click on the “custom address” text at the top right, it isn’t simply a label for the email address that it’s under, it is an action. An oddity with MintEmail, though, is that everytime I sent an email I got a bounce from them that said there was a permanent failure (piping to their recieve script) that would make me think it never got the mail, but it does show up on the site. Since the purpose of these is all for automated mail and bounces are all going to be ignored, it isn’t much of a big deal.

Mailinator and Dodgeit also seem to give you an rss feed of the mailbox, I’m not overly sure what that would be useful for, but it never hurts I guess. Dodgeit, which has the least polished look and didn’t actually work for me does have an interesting feature where if you pay them $10 you can put a password on an email address. I think that’s a pretty cool feature, so you can basically have your own personalized read-only email address that just throws mail away periodically. I dig that.

Guerrilla Mail also has the unique, among these sites, offering of actually being able to reply to the mails received. Although initially I felt like that wasn’t a great function since this would mostly be used for one way mailings, I realized that some places like you to confirm your receipt of their email with a response email. In this case Guerrilla Mail would be the only way to go. (Thanks to GM for pointing this feature out to me, I had completely overlooked it in my going over of these sites).

For my money I think MintEmail hits all the features on the head, with a good interface, clean design and fast receipt. It also has the nicest domain name. :) Guerrilla Mail and Mailinator are both good as well, I personally like being able to type in any email address and then going to the mail site to pick it up, but really it’s no more convenient than going first to the mail site and copy and pasting - in fact that method may ultimately be faster, since you don’t actually ever have to type or remember anything. Dodgeit simply took too long to be worth considering as a contender at this point.

P.S. If you are of the nerdly persuasion you ought to check out this post on the architecture of mailinator, it’s pretty amazing.

Apr 5th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: review · web app · web2.0