As of July 1, 2005, the Mailinator’s site makeover has broken Nator. Since I added RSS feeds to Mailinator, and I have other things going on, I have no plans to update Nator.
–Brian
What is it?
Nator is a utility that makes use of Mailinator. It can grab email from Mailinator.com and mail it to your home email address and it can also create random usernames and monitor those for you.
Requirements:
Java. You must have java installed. If you don’t have Java installed, go to http://java.sun.com and download it. It requires Java 1.4 or better.
Features:
- Can send the messages in a mailinator mailbox to your home email account – useful if you want to keep the registration info that you had sent to mailinator
- Can create and monitor a random mailinator username – useful
if you want a little bit more security for your mailinator email — can create 2.2721486193e+23 different names — nobody will guess your username and read your registration info - Can monitor ANY mailinator username and mail it to you
- Saves all info entered so you can use it next time
- Lists all of the “alternate” domains you can use for mailinator.com
- Can be configured to check for email every X minutes – useful if you can’t sit there and keep checking for an email – have it sent to your home email address automatically
- Automatically checks for updates and notifies you if there is an update
- Multi-pLatform since it’s written in Java (Swing) – should work on ANY platform that supports Java
- FREE (just like mailinator.com)
License:
Nator, like Mailinator.com, is completely free. There are no warranties or guarantees though. Use at your own risk (though it works fine for me).
Screenshots:
Here are a few (old) Nator screenshots.
Download/Install:
Download the nator.1.1.zip file then unzip it to any directory. That’s the entire install. No registry entires or anything are created. If you delete the directory you just created, all traces of it are gone.
Running Nator
Windows:
If you are running on Windows and have Java installed and available on your path, you should just be able to run the runme.bat file. If Java is installed but not on your path, you’ll have to edit the runme.bat file so that it points to the full path of your java.exe. So, this:
java -jar nator.jar
becomes
<path to your java.exe> -jar nator.jar
so it might be something like:
“C:\Program Files\Java1.4\java.exe” -jar nator.jar
Linux/Unix:
Pretty much the same as the Windows instructions except there is no runme included. To make it easy for yourself you probably want to write a startup script so that it will run or just type java -jar nator.jar to run it. I’ll assume that if you’re running linux/Unix you know what you’re doing. Email me if you can’t get it to work.
Macintosh:
I don’t have a Mac and I know little about them. This should work since there is no specific code for it NOT to work on a Mac. If anyone tries it on a Mac, please let me know how it went.
How to Use
The first time you run it, you need to go to the advanced tab and fill in the email address to send the messages to and your SMTP server. Also, decide if you want the original Froms or if you would rather have one From for all of the emails.
Now go to the Main tab. If you just used a mailinator email on a website, just type the username into the box and hit the start button. If you want a random email to use on a web form, press “Generate Random” then choose what domain you want. Now press “Copy to Clipboard” then just paste into the webform. Once you finish the form and they say they emailed you, hit the Start button to start checking for the mail they sent. That’s pretty much it.
Future
I have abandoned this as of 2005.
Links: