10 Minute Mail is a new service for creating temporary email addresses. These addresses can be used for registering on sites that require users to provide an email address. The goal is to to rid users of a lot of unsolicited spam emails. Chris Null from Yahoo! has a review of the service:

Well here’s a brain-dead simple solution to the problem: 10 Minute Mail (Note: Web traffic from this story may be causing the 10 Minute Mail site to crash. If it doesn’t load, try it again later.), which provides, for free, exactly what is promised in the name: An email address that vanishes after 10 minutes. There’s no registration, no verification. Just click over to the site and hit “Get my 10 Minute Mail e-mail address.” You’ll instantly be given an address that ceases to exist after 10 minutes. You can then use this address in filling out web forms or whatnot, and a very simple web-based interface gives you full access to any mail the account receives. You can reply to any messages, but you can’t send mail to an account that hasn’t already emailed you. If you can’t get the job done in 10 minutes, you can reset the timer to 10 minutes at any time. There’s no need to login, no password to remember.

For safe surfing and spam avoidance, I haven’t found a simpler, more elegant solution than 10 Minute Mail. It works flawlessly and couldn’t be easier to use. It’s earned a place in my Favorites folder. Give it a spin and see what you think!

I can see this being useful when you want to register for some event or something but you don’t want to receive any follow on emails…Typically, though, most users (including me) have an email address just for the purpose of registering for services that could send spam emails.

Now, what happens if a site requires users to give a valid email address, as part of their term of service (TOS). Isn’t using 10minutemail generated addresses a violation of such terms? Also all the emails that this service generates are from domain 10minutemail.com…Couldn’t the sites that are asking for user email address just reject emails with 10minutemail.com domain, as part of email validation?

Overall, it just seems like a wrong solution to the problem. The real solution is to punish businesses or service providers that spam their users by signing out or boycotting them. Trying to fake one’s identity to avoid potential spam mail, just does not seem like the right way to address this issue.