'Navigating HTC Email Menu' photo (c) 2010, Digitpedia Com - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Many Web 2.0 applications that I have my students use require a valid email for registration. Often they can all just use one account that I’ve already set-up and validated.

However, sometimes sites don’t allow multiple users online at the same time on one account. Also, if everyone has access to everybody’s work, it’s possible for a student who’s feeling mischievous to play around with another student’s project. For these reasons, and others, at times it’s good for students to have individual accounts.

For my high school students, I don’t think it’s a big deal to have them use their own email accounts. However, I can see that it could raise privacy and safety issues for younger students.  For that reason I have posted several links on the top of my Examples of Student Work page that allow people to create email addresses that last a very short time and require no personal information.  These enable you to receive a request for validation and then click on it.

They’re all pretty similar, and only appear to vary in the period of time they exist before they shut-down.  I thought it would be helpful to have a “The Best…” list compiling them.  There are quite a few others, but they don’t have clearly defined times when they will cease-to-exist. And since anyone can check the in-box of these email addresses just by typing in the addresses, I’ve only included the ones that will exist for very short times.

Of course, if you’re going to have students use them, this means they won’t be able to have the Web 2.0 application mail them their password if they forget it in the future. Even with my students using their own email, I always keep a list of usernames and passwords from all of them — just in case.

Here are my choices for The Best Temporary Email Address Sites For Students (or Anyone).  They’re not listed in any order of preference:

Mail Catch lasts a few hours.

Dispostable

MyTrash Mail

Trash In Box

TempMail.altmails lets you, or students, create…temporary email addresses

AtlMails provides temporary email addresses for free.

Tempmail

ETempMail

Temp Inbox lets you create temporary email addresses.

As always, feedback is welcome.

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