Mailinator FAQs
You will find Frequently Asked Questions about the Mailinator Service below.
Please Note: Mailinator is a receive-only email system and cannot send email. Mailinator also does not have the ability to fill forms. Any malicious activity of the sort is not related to the Mailinator service or its employees.
Yes!
Mailinator gives you inboxes on demand, making it easy to test your systems’ email workflow.
Mailinator Subscriptions simplify testing even further, with private domains, API access, SMS numbers, webhooks, and more. If you’re testing an email workflow, request a trial today!
Public Mailinator is a free, disposable email service. Every possible address @mailinator.com already exists and anyone can use it.
There’s no signup and no login. You don’t even need to “create” an address — every possible one already exists.
People typically use Public Mailinator when they need to share an email address but don’t want to risk spam to their real one. Just make up an address on the fly, such as joe123@mailinator.com or happybill@mailinator.com. Then visit the Mailinator website, open that inbox, and read any email sent to it.
Mailinator subscriptions let businesses do serious email testing. You can create thousands of email addresses on the fly, which is extremely convenient for testing environments. Subscriptions include:
- Complete privacy for all your emails.
- Every email address at your Private Domain(s). That's millions of email addresses ready to go! We'll give you your own Private Domain when you subscribe, but you can change it to a domain you own at any time.
- WEB and API access to all inboxes, emails, and SMS messages.
- Optional private SMS numbers attached to your account for SMS testing.
- Persistent storage for your messages. Keep messages around as long as needed.
- High rate-limits in both reading and receiving emails. Mailinator's public spam filters are turned off for Private Domains.
- Webhook actions to take whenever an email is received. Forward it, auto-click its links, delete it, and more.
- Setup user accounts for all your team members.
- Enterprise accounts can get Single-Sign-On (SSO) for extra security.
Public emails (sent to an address @mailinator.com) last several hours before the system auto-deletes them. Once deleted, they can’t be recovered.
Mailinator Subscriptions give you permanent, first-in-first-out storage instead. Your emails stay until you delete them (via web or API) or until your storage fills up and pushes out the oldest messages. Paid plans offer several storage levels, so you can keep emails indefinitely if you choose.
No — Mailinator is a receive-only system. There’s no option on the website to send email.
Our SPF, DMARC, and DKIM records confirm this: any email that claims to be “sent from” a Mailinator address has a forged FROM address and should be treated as such.
Here are some limitations of the free system (note: paid Mailinator Subscriptions don’t have these limits):
- All emails are public. Any person can read anywhere. Do not expect privacy.
- Emails only last a few hours. After that point, they are deleted and unrecoverable.
- You may not send emails from Mailinator. The system is receive-only.
- Attachments are not allowed in the public system.
- The Public system has certain limitations based on email size, rate-limiting, spam prevention, etc.
You may find Mailinator’s official Privacy Policy by clicking here.
Mailinator doesn’t keep logs of website access.
Anyone can read an email without signing up, logging in, or sharing personal information. Mailinator doesn’t store identifying information, such as your IP address, and has worked this way for years.
Note: this could change if law enforcement compels it.
This policy applies only to the Mailinator public site (addresses @mailinator.com) — not to private domains used by paid subscribers.
Mailinator tracks real-time data to detect abuse and bans abusers or specific emails when needed.
We keep several days of aggregate data showing website-usage trends, but this data contains no identifying information.
We also keep a small number of emails — far less than 1% of total volume — for spam analysis, for no more than a few days.
That question doesn’t quite make sense — public Mailinator email addresses (those ending in @mailinator.com) aren’t owned by anyone. The public system has no accounts, signup, or login, so anyone can use any address.
You don’t! All the inboxes at Mailinator already exist. Simply send an email to anyaddress@mailinator.com then go to that inbox in the Public Mailinator system and your email will be there.
No, Mailinator is a receive-only email system used primarily by developers and QA testers to test automated workflows. Mailinator cannot fill forms or send emails.