Have you ever wanted to see what the email a visitor to your website receives after they sign up on your MLS Search – or on one of your forms?  Or, have you tried to test the login process on your site, but because you’ve already signed in before, the login is not shown when you land on a page?

All this can be rather frustrating.  Just how many email addresses do you want to create?  And, do you really want to handle the junk mail and spam that will end up being sent to all of them?

Here’s a handy way to get around all those issues:  Malinator.com.

I suggest you read the FAQs on the Mailinator site before you use it.  But, here’s a quick summary:

• You don’t have to set up a mailbox at Mailinator.  Any address that looks like [Name]@Mailinator.com will be accepted.
• The emails sent to mailinator are only available for a few hours, then they are automatically deleted.
• There is no password to view the email sent to Mailinator.  Anyone who has the email address can check the email at the Malinator site by entering the email address in the “CHECK YOUR INBOX”  field on the site.
• Attachments are stripped out of any incoming email.

So, why is this handy?  Well, first of all, you can send to an email address on the fly – no email account set up is required.  And, you don’ t have to worry about what happens to the messages because they are deleted for you.

So, let’s say you wanted to test the login on your MLS Search.  Just register on the search using an email address that would be diffcult for someone else to come across randomly.  You can use anything.  For example:  test12mail4me@mailinator.com

Once you’ve registered, go to the Mailinator site and put test12mail4me@mailinator.com in the Check Your Inbox field, then click Go.

You’ll see if the registration worked, what the email looks like, and so forth.  You can’t really use this process to see what the files will look like for an autoresponder, since attachments are stripped off, but you can tell if your autoresponder is actually generating emails.

Mailinator is useful in very specific situations.  If you’re testing the receipt of top secret government codes or off-shore checking account numbers, I would think of a different approach.  But, for a lot of just regular testing, it can be a real timesaver!