Mailinator - Temporary Email Addresses for Registration/Activation

Hi All, I have recently been introduced to web service which has proved to be most worthwhile to my classroom web 2.0 forays. As a middle school teacher I have always experienced difficulty when introducing new web based programs to my students when the program has required an email address for the purpose of activation. Several of my younger students do not have email addresses and their parents are opposed to them having one. This has limited my ability to have students set up individual accounts. My introduction to Mailinator.com has provided a workaround for students without email accounts. Although you cannot send email via Mailinator.com, it does allow you to receive email at an address that you assign with the mailinator.com domain address. If a website requires an email address for activation purposes you can makeup an email address following the format, yourchoice@mailinator.com. The activation information will be sent to the specified address and you can simply proceed to the Mailinator.com site search out your specified address, access your activation information and proceed to activate your registration without having to worry about spam.
Trevor

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Permalink Reply by Ellen on November 29, 2008 at 6:51pm

Yep. Mailinator is was one of my best kept secrets. =)

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Permalink Reply by suehellman on November 30, 2008 at 8:43am

I had a similar issue in that I do not want to use my personal or school email for online websites I want to use in class.

I got around that using gmail which can be accessed anywhere and is a full email service. For tools sites such as Vuvox, Squidoo, and Glogster, and Dipity, I use a generic gmail address with a single generic user name and password. Anyone in our small school can sign in to those account with that information. Periodically (eg end of the semester) I clear out old projects.

I have also set up special accounts for subjects and have arranged for subscriptions to subject-related resources (eg. NASA online, the Smithsonian, and various online magaizines to come to each gmail box so that the students can view them.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Guditus on November 30, 2008 at 12:41pm

How does the mailinator (or other services such as Vuvox) differ from having students sign up for a typical email account through a server like yahoo.com? It seems like students still end up opening an email account or am I not understanding correctly?

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Permalink Reply by suehellman on November 30, 2008 at 6:31pm

Vuvox & the others linked above are not an email sites. They are web tools I use with the kids.

I register with those and other such sites for my class or (in our case) for the school using a generic gmail account, a generic sign in name, and a generic password. My name is Ms. Hellman, so I might use something like: 'mshblocka@gmail.com' for the gmail, 'mshblocka students' for the sign in, and mshblocka1 for the password.

I try to keep all sign in names and passwords for the sites to be used by one class the same so they are easy to recall. I might have to register with a website more than once, but because the gmail addresses are all different, it's all good once I've set everything up. I delete the old student files at the end of the semester, and then reuse everything when the new classes arrive.

(I have another set I use when giving workshops so that colleagues can sign in without having to register. Their stuff is left up for one month.)

When the kids go to a website, they sign in under that information, but save their individual files under their own names. I am very sticky about their file names (Last name, first initial) so that I can easily see which file belongs to each student or group.

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Permalink Reply by Trevor S. Angood on December 11, 2009 at 4:34pm

A work around that I was told about is google "dummy" accounts. What you can do is if you have the email mrcomets@gmail.com, students can sign up for web 2.0 sites with the e-mail address mrcomets+janedoe@gmail.com where janedoe is the students name. Gmail/google ignores everything after the plus and will send it to your mrcomets e-mail address. From there, you can create filters where the students e-mail's will send to and stay out of your inbox. Thus, if they need their password again, you can look it up for them.

I have not tried it out personally, but am looking forward to trying it out on an offsite moodle site because my charter school does not have moodle access.