A private, free Mailinator alternative for verification emails

Mailinator's free inboxes are public — anyone can read them. receivemail.dev gives you a private throwaway inbox over one API call, still free, still no signup.

Mailinator has been the go-to throwaway inbox for well over a decade. The free version is genuinely useful for a quick manual check: type any name @mailinator.com, open the public inbox, read the email. For automated tests and for anything you'd rather not have strangers see, though, two things get in the way — the free inboxes are public and world-readable, and programmatic/API access plus private domains are on the paid plans.

receivemail.dev covers the same "read a verification email in a test" job, but every address is private to whoever created it (reads are gated by a per-mailbox secret returned at creation), and API access is the only interface — there's nothing to log into and nothing to pay.

Side by side

	receivemail.dev	Mailinator (free)	Mailinator (paid)
Price	Free	Free	From ~$59/mo (check current pricing)
Signup / account	None	None	Required
Inbox privacy	Private — secret required to read	Public — anyone who guesses the name reads it	Private team domain
API to read messages	Yes	No (web UI / RSS only)	Yes
Private / custom domain	No (shared domain, unguessable address)	No	Yes
Retention	Up to 60 min TTL	A few hours, best-effort	Configurable
Send email	No	No	No
Good for	Automated tests, CI, throwaway checks	One-off manual checks	QA teams needing a private shared domain

Mailinator's plan names and prices change — see mailinator.com/pricing for the current numbers.

Why "public inbox" matters in a test

• Anyone watching @mailinator.com can see the verification codes your test triggers — and, if your signup flow leaks anything else (names, reset links), that too.
• Addresses are guessable, so another user (or a bot) can land on the same inbox you're using and your test reads their message instead of yours.
• Some services now block mailinator.com outright at signup because it's so well known.

receivemail.dev hands you a random address on a less-burned domain and only the holder of the creation secret can read it.

When Mailinator is still the right call

• You just want to eyeball one email by hand — the public inbox is faster than any API.
• Your team wants a private shared domain everyone uses (that's the paid plan's core value).
• You need messages to stick around longer than an hour.
• You're already invested in Mailinator's rule-based routing / webhooks.

Moving a test over

# was: hit https://api.mailinator.com/... with an API token
resp=$(curl -s -X POST https://receivemail.dev/mailboxes)
addr=$(echo "$resp" | jq -r .address)
secret=$(echo "$resp" | jq -r .secret)

# ... run your signup against $addr ...

curl -s "https://receivemail.dev/mailboxes/$addr/messages" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $secret"

Full shell + Playwright walkthrough: the CI testing guide.

Other alternatives people compare

• MailSlurp — a full email platform (send + receive, SMTP/IMAP, permanent inboxes). See the MailSlurp comparison.
• Mailosaur — paid email and SMS testing for QA teams. See the Mailosaur comparison.
• mail.tm / DropMail — also free, no-signup, API-accessible; similar niche to receivemail.dev with different retention and rate limits.