Mailinator is a software tool that allows you to test automated emails, such as account verification and password reset emails, using disposable email addresses.
Testing such emails is important. Otherwise, you might end up sending emails with links that don’t work.
Mailinator offers both free public disposable email addresses for testing purposes and free private inboxes.
Mailinator is also useful for setting up disposable email addresses for signing up for online accounts that require you to verify your email. You don’t need to create an account with Mailinator; instead, simply enter a randomized email address and create a public inbox that you can use to receive the verification code.
If you need to download an ebook, for example, and the site requires you to verify your email address, you can use Mailinator.
However, the free plans for email testing are limited, and the premium plans are rather expensive.
Also, to get free private inboxes, you’ll need to verify your account with a LinkedIn profile or phone number. You also can’t sign up with an email address that starts with something like admin@ or info@.
If you can’t verify your account, you’ll need to use the free public addresses, which anyone can theoretically access, after which they can read your test emails or delete them.
Not only that, but some websites are no longer accepting Mailinator accounts for registration purposes due to so many people using Mailinator for such reasons. If you’ve been using Mailinator to create disposable email addresses for email verification purposes, it might be time to look for other options.
Fortunately, some great alternatives exist.
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Best Mailinator Alternatives
1. Mailtrap
Mailtrap is an email testing service that allows you to analyze email content and test your automated workflows. It’s the best alternative to Mailinator because it lets you set up a fake SMTP server to do your tests.
Using your fake SMTP server, you can set up multiple inboxes while keeping them separate from your real email list to avoid sending test emails to your list by mistake.
Doing that instead of using disposable but real email addresses ensures that your domain reputation won’t get ruined.
Even if you would get the private inboxes with Mailinator Verified Pro or one of the premium Mailinator plans, using them too often means spam filters might start filtering out emails sent from your domain.
After all, you will be sending emails to real inboxes – and since they are test emails, a higher percentage of them will have deliverability issues.
You can actually use your fake Mailtrap SMTP credentials in any tool that supports SMTP.
While testing, you can validate the CSS and HTML code in your email to ensure it works well on different email clients on different devices.
Sometimes, certain lines of code won’t work well on certain email clients. You can find unsupported code quickly and fix it right away.
Likewise, you can also compare different versions of emails to find the one that works best.
You can also validate headers, check BCC emails, and run daily automated checks so you can figure out any issues and fix them right away.
There is a forever free plan that allows you to send up to 500 test emails per month. The free plan allows for a single inbox and five emails per second.
The free plan is best if you have limited needs or just want to try Mailtrap out. Otherwise, you can sign up for one of the premium plans, which start at $9/month.
The Individual plan is perfect for bloggers, freelancers, email marketers, and others working alone. However, if you have team members you’d like to collaborate with, you can upgrade to one of the team plans – the priciest plan allows up to 999 team members.
You can check the pricing page for updated pricing details.
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2. Mailosaur
Mailosaur is a more affordable option than Mailinator. Designed for quality assurance teams, it allows you to test apps, products, and campaigns.
It has three main use cases:
- Test email workflows
- Test SMS workflows
- See how emails look in real life
You can create an unlimited number of email addresses, though your plan determines how many emails you can send a day to those inboxes. You’ll be able to test email and SMS verification messages, marketing messages, password reset emails, and more.
Not only that, but you can preview how your email will look on any email client, including Outlook, IBM Notes, Apple Mail, Gmail, and others. In addition, you can test for deliverability issues that may be preventing your email from being delivered to certain inboxes.
Also, Mailosour allows you to test multifactor authentication processes, mimicking authentication apps like Google Authenticator, but availability does depend on your plan.
While Mailosaur doesn’t offer a free plan at the moment, plans start from just $9/month, making it more affordable than Mailinator.
In addition, one thing I liked a lot about Mailosaur is that pricing is more flexible than Mailinator. Regardless of which plan you choose, you can customize it by adding more monthly emails, previews, or SMS messages.
You can also sign up for a custom plan if you have a large enterprise. Make sure to check the pricing page for updated pricing information.
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3. MailSlurp
Using MailSlurp’s API, you can create an unlimited number of disposable, real email addresses you can use to test verification codes, password reset links, and other email workflows.
Using the online dashboard in your account, you’ll be able to create inboxes, view emails and attachments, and manage your test workflows.
MailSlurp is designed for both individuals and teams, allowing you to set up team inboxes.
To ensure deliverability, MailSlurp uses machine learning to test your emails for virus scores, spam scores, and email authentication methods like DMARC and DKIM, ensuring your emails don’t get flagged by Gmail’s spam filters.
As it has APIs in many languages, developers and quality assurance teams all over the world can use Mail Slurp.
With flexible pay-as-you-go and monthly pricing plans, MailSlurp allows you to scale your testing automation workflows as your business grows.
Not only is MailSlurp affordable, but its excellent spam and virus testing features and easy-to-navigate online dashboard make it an attractive Mailinator alternative.
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4. Testmail
Testmail has a forever free plan that allows you to test your automated email workflows. Using Testmail, you can test transactional emails, drip emails, verification codes, and more.
You can create an unlimited number of test email mailboxes for free. Send your test emails there to check their spam scores, and keep improving the emails until you get a satisfactory score that won’t get you flagged.
Testmail checks your SpamAssassin scores. Apache SpamAssassin, developed over two decades ago, is one of the most widely used anti-spam filtering programs for email.
One of the good things about Testmail is that you can invite as many collaborators as you want, regardless of which plan you are on. After inviting your team members via email, you can share your test emails, see what other team members are doing, and more.
If you have more than one team, you can even sign up for the multi-team enterprise plan. Testmail is a better alternative than Mailinator for teams.
Testmail has ample documentation to help you learn how to use the JSON and GraphQL APIs.
Some features include advanced filtering, sorting, live queries, and pagination.
The free Testmail plan only lets you send 100 emails a month. However, you can upgrade to 10,000 emails a month for as low as $9/month, making Testmail a very affordable option for individuals and teams.
Even the cheapest premium plan lets you have unlimited team members, which isn’t something you’ll get from Mailinator.
Testmail even allows you to have unlimited temporary surges at no additional cost.
However, unlimited temporary surges doesn’t mean you can just go over your plan limit consistently. Things happen, so accidental surges are okay, but if you do it all the time, Testmail will require you to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
In addition, Testmail has a fair usage policy that requires you to stay within fair limits of your plan. In other words, if you use large attachments and use up too many resources, Testmail might contact you about a custom plan.
If you upgrade to more expensive plans, you get priority support. That means you can ask questions and have real developers and engineers answer your questions.
Also, if you run a nonprofit or school, you may be able to get a discount.
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5. Mail7
Mail7 is another free email automation testing platform. You can create disposable public email addresses without even signing up.
The platform offers a REST API to automate test flows and email content, but you can also use the web interface to read received mail manually.
Mail7 has ample documentation on using the platform.
While free unregistered users are limited to public inboxes for testing purposes, you can also sign up for a free trial of the Pro account. You don’t need a credit card – all you need is your email address.
Mail7 is still in beta mode, so you can expect the platform to be continually improved over time. The signup process is extremely simple and quick.
Overall, Mail7 is a decent alternative to Mailinator, with an interface that is easier to navigate and figure out.
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6. Guerilla Mail
Guerilla Mail allows you to generate a temporary email address, which you can use to sign up for throwaway accounts. You can create an unlimited number of disposable email addresses, which will be accessible from any device.
Like Mailinator, the disposable inboxes you create on Guerilla Mail are public and require no registration. The inboxes are not password protected, which means that as long as you know the email address – or chance upon it randomly – you will be able to read the mail in it.
All received mail gets deleted rather quickly. Guerilla Mail’s time frame is much shorter though, as all emails get deleted after just one hour.
Unlike Mailinator, however, Guerilla Mail isn’t just good for accepting mail at the temporary address but also for sending mail! You can send mail from your temporary or throwaway account to any inbox.
Mailinator’s public system is receive-only.
If you are using Guerilla Mail for testing purposes, that feature can actually be very useful. You can create multiple disposable emails and reply to test emails to see how replies would show up on your end.
However, Guerilla Mail’s main use case is not automated testing.
Guerilla Mail also lets you scramble your temporary email address so that when you give it out to websites during signup, they won’t have any way of knowing what your real address is. That way, you can keep using the temporary email address forever.
Guerilla Mail is open source, unlike Mailinator. That means that it is always free to use – you’ll never have to pay for it.
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7. Mailnest
Mailnest is an email testing tool for quality assurance teams and developers. Using a virtual SMTP server, you can test multiple email scenarios, check for errors in your email code, see how your emails show up on different devices, and more.
You can check the spam score of your company’s emails to ensure they don’t end up in the spam folders. You’ll be able to set up automated testing workflows while ensuring that the test emails don’t end up in real customers’ inboxes by accident.
Mailnest calls itself the world’s easiest email testing tool, which may be true. The signup process is incredibly straightforward, making it a good alternative to Mailinator if you find Mailinator a bit confusing.
While Mailnest doesn’t currently offer a free plan, it does offer a free trial. In addition, pricing is generally affordable, so check out the pricing plans here.
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8. GlockApps
GlockApps is one of the best Mailinator alternatives if you want to focus on testing the spam content of your emails. That’s not Mailinator’s strongest point, but it’s the main thing that GlockApps focuses on.
The free spam checker tool is incredibly easy to use, and it will instantly tell you where your mail is ending up in Gmail, Outlook, and other inboxes.
The reason you’ll want to use GlockApps instead of simply sending a test email to your own inbox is that Gmail might personalize your spam folder and not flag certain emails as spam based on your interactions with emails from the same sender in the past.
GlockApps will send your email to multiple inboxes and tell you the exact percentage of inboxes in which your emails end up in spam.
Running a quick spam test couldn’t be simpler. Just go to this page, copy the email address that shows up there, and send your email message to that email address.
GlockApps will resend the email through its own networks and then give you a quick report on the screen.
It also uses spam filters like SpamAssassin, Google Spam Filter, and other filters to detect spam issues in your emails. It analyzes your emails, including the content and actual HTML code, and will pinpoint content or other factors in your emails that are causing them to end up in spam.
However, you don’t have to do that manually every time you create a new email. You can set up automated spam testing, so you get notified as soon as spam issues start popping up in our emails.
As the spam filter algorithms evolve, there’s always the possibility that your emails can start getting flagged as spam without you ever finding out.
GlockApps also has an uptime blacklist monitoring tool, which allows you to check your emails against over 50 industry blacklists. If you end up on one of those blacklists, which could interfere with your email deliverability, you will get notified instantly.
You can also get advice from experts on how to improve your email deliverability. If you’ve been running tests with GlockApps and noticed that your emails are not arriving, and you can’t figure out how to fix things, the Email Deliverability Consulting service might interest you.
You can run three email spam tests for free and up to five automatic tests. Starting from $45/month, you can get more than 2,000 email spam tests and other premium perks.
Pricing is flexible, and you can save money by purchasing a few products (such as spam testing and uptime monitoring) in a bundle. Check out the pricing page here.
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9. Email on Acid
Another product worth looking into is Email on Acid. Email on Acid is a better alternative than Mailinator if your focus is mostly on content testing – ensuring that your emails look good on different devices and email clients.
Email on Acid actually supports over 90 email clients and devices, covering almost all clients and devices your subscribers might be using. You can ensure that your emails don’t contain errors which can confuse subscribers.
Working with teams is easy, as you can simply share a link so your teammates can see the email preview.
However, Email on Acid is also excellent for testing for deliverability issues. It checks your emails against a total of 23 spam filters, thus ensuring that they remain spam free and don’t get flagged and sent to your subscribers’ spam folders.
It also makes sure that your IP address is not blacklisted by one of the industry blacklists, which could cause all of the emails you send from that IP address to end up in spam.
One thing I enjoy about Email on Acid is that it has a pre-deployment checklist that helps remove the stress that would be involved in a manual review.
Email on Acid isn’t the cheapest – when you pay monthly, prices start at $99/month. However, you can get a free trial and a discount if you sign up for yearly billing.
In any case, Email on Acid is worth it if you want your email marketing campaigns to be successful. You can see updated pricing here.
10. Litmus
Another awesome alternative to Mailinator for previewing email content is Litmus. On a single dashboard, you can instantly see how your email would show up on over 100 different email clients.
Those email clients include dark mode versions, something that is often overlooked by such testing platforms. Many of your clients might be using dark mode, and you want to ensure that your emails still appear the way you meant them to.
For quality assurance, you can set up an automated test of each email before you send it to ensure that links are working properly and the email is ready to be sent to your list.
Litmus is also a superior alternative to Mailinator when testing for deliverability issues. Litmus Spam Testing checks your email against over 25 spam and placement filters including Spam Assassin and the placement filters of Yandex, AOL Mail, and many others.
To make your life easier, the spam testing feature integrates with Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, and other email service providers.
Pricing starts from $99/month with monthly billing and $79/month with yearly billing. You can see updated pricing here.
11. Email Preview Services
Email Preview Services might have an unoriginal name, but it’s another decent alternative to Mailinator. You can test the content and design of your emails before sending them and check for spam and deliverability issues.
You can check your IP address against around 50 of the top industry blacklists to ensure you didn’t end up on one of those dreaded lists.
Some of the email clients Email Preview Services supports for email design testing include Apple Mail, MS Outlook, and many others.
There are a few ways to test an email. One way is to simply copy and paste the email content into your online account box, but you can also upload an HTML file or forward the email to a special email address.
Email Preview Services also has some features that Mailinator is lacking, like a drag and drop email editor that can help you improve your email design.
Either way, pricing is affordable, starting at just $20/month. You can see updated pricing here.
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Wrapping It Up: What Is the Best Mailinator Alternative?
While there are many viable Mailinator alternatives, I recommend using Mailtrap for email testing purposes.
Its fake SMPT server means you don’t even need to use disposable email addresses, thus running no risk of having your domain flagged as a spam sender. It also has a decent free plan and very affordable premium plans.
If your sole goal is creating disposable email addresses for verification and signup purposes, though, I recommend using Guerilla Mail, which is open source and offers several domains to choose from.
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