Recently I threw together a tool to simplify my sign up on other services. It’s a script that allows me to use an email address one time, and then ignore all future emails to that address. I often use it for signing up to new services so that I can get the confirmation email, but not get a bunch of spam / bacon I don’t really care about. I set it up with a custom domain so that I can use anything at that domain as an email address. For example, test1@mycustomdomain.com, test2@mycustomdomain.com, and anotherdumbemail@mycustomdomain.com.
The interesting part of it, though, is that the emails all dump to a PHP script. This script looks at the email address it was sent to, and checks a database to see if that email address has been seen before or not. If it hasn’t, it will forward that email to my “real” email address. If it has, it will ignore it.
This has been super helpful when making test accounts on services too as it’s easy to get another email address, but I don’t have to worry about checking a weird email account or getting a bunch of spam afterwards. Just thought I’d mention it in case anyone else out there does a lot of this stuff.
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