Mailinator vs MailTester

Mailinator provides temporary inboxes and tools for testing email and SMS workflows. Developers, QA teams, and businesses can use it to check delivery for OTP, MFA, onboarding, password recovery, and other email processes at scale. Paid subscriptions include private testing domains, where messages can arrive at any address without creating an inbox first. The REST API retrieves inboxes, messages, and SMS, injects messages, and connects with CI/CD pipelines. Inbound webhooks can accept HTTP POST messages from sources such as alert systems, Zapier, or Twilio, then apply configured rules. SMS can be routed to an inbox or API for automated OTP and 2FA testing. The free public inboxes are readable by anyone, and messages typically auto-delete after several hours. Mailinator is receive-only: it cannot send email or fill out forms. The Public - Free plan is free to use without sign-up. Business costs $79 a month billed yearly; a two-week Business trial is listed. Other plans include Verified Pro at free, Business Plus at $159 a month billed yearly, and Enterprise at a price agreed with the maker with custom pricing.

MailTester checks why email may reach spam and returns a deliverability score out of 10. To run a test, generate a disposable address, send the message there and receive a report in seconds. Scoring starts at 10, subtracts points for detected issues, and explains penalties with suggested fixes. Authentication checks include SPF, DKIM, DMARC, domain alignment, reverse DNS and forward-confirmed reverse DNS. Sending IPs are checked against Spamhaus, SpamCop, Barracuda and other DNS blocklists. Content analysis covers HTML, text-to-image ratio, links, subject, List-Unsubscribe and Message-ID. Rspamd supplies a spam score and triggered rules. Newsletter checks include one-click List-Unsubscribe under RFC 8058, message size and text-image ratio. MailTester offers web, API and self-hosted platforms. Its API creates test addresses and reads report status and scores as JSON. The free plan costs nothing, needs no account and provides 25+ checks per test.