When we started building temporary email systems, our main goal was to allow users to avoid spam. Let’s face it, there are no free lunches, When you get something for free you usually end up paying for it in some other way.
Unfortunately a lot of business models around the internet involve us giving away part of our digital privacy in return for some “free” content or service.
So building nada as a temporary email solution came up as a need to help protect our private emails but still be able to test lots of services. I’m really into SaaS services and testing lots of them while building a new one and nada gives me the ability to test some services without exposing my gmail to drip campaign and “updates” from growth hackers.
Looking at the statistics for the domains that send us these emails (of course only looking at statistics and completely anonymous) I generated a short table of use cases which our users seem to enjoy. Here it is.
Facebook registrations
Twitter registrations
Dating / meeting other people services
Giveaways Freebies (frequent flyer, miles, points for shopping etc)
Anonymous payment gateways
Online boards
Shopping
Online games
Communication (Skype and others)
Misc
Unfortunately I suspect lots of the Facebook / twitter activity is just click farm workers taking a ride on the fact the big ones are not blocking this kind of activity.
Happy temp emailing girls and boys. BTW we just passed 23,000,000 incoming messages.