Unique email addresses are really useful for testing or demo accounts, but creating them can be a real pain. One common approach is to register multiple accounts with free email services like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, but those can be time consuming to create and difficult to track. There’s also the Gmail “+ trick,” where you add a “+” and an arbitrary string after your Gmail account name (e.g., myname+whatever@gmail.com), but that results in all the transactional and marketing emails from the services you’re testing going into your main Gmail inbox, which can flood it over time. A practical and inexpensive solution I’ve found is using .xyz “1.111B domains” along with a Mailinator Verified Pro account.
Gen.xyz, which maintains the .xyz domain space, offers what they call 1.111B domains. These include any numeric combination from six to nine digits (e.g. 101010.xyz), priced at $0.99 per year, or even less with some registrars like Namecheap, where they’re currently $0.84 per year. 1.111B domains are ideal for test accounts because they’re unique to you and aren’t recognized as known “catch-all” or junk mail domains, which some services may disallow.
Alongside your domain, you’ll need a Mailinator Verified Pro account. This single-user account is free if you enter your contact information and provide a supported use case, like testing. You can configure Mailinator to use your 1.111B domain, and once you update your DNS MX records to point at Mailinator, emails addressed to any address at your domain will be delivered to a single Mailinator inbox.
A bonus feature of Mailinator Verified Pro is webhook testing. With this, you can create up to 10 custom webhook URLs, and any messages sent to those URLs will be delivered to your Mailinator inbox. This is particularly helpful for webhook development, as it lets you to capture and inspect payloads before deploying your endpoint, or if you prefer to keep test data out of a live system.
For less than $1 a year, an .xyz domain combined with Mailinator Verified Pro makes it easy to generate all the test email addresses you’ll ever need.