Dead letter bin / black hole email address

Question

I'm looking for an email address that can be sent to where the mail will just be deleted without a bounce back. RFC 2606 defines example.com as a fictitious domain for documentation. Is there something similar for email? This will be used in printed documentation, needs to be stable (the domain can't go stale or replaced by an NSFW site), and as generic as possible.

Answer 1

bit-bucket@test.smtp.org
The good old bitbucket, just what you're looking for.

Answer 2

You could use a service such as Mailinator, where you can send an email to addresses such as:

{any-valid-string}@mailinator.com

The email will be deleted after a few hours. However, in theory, the email can be read by anyone who knows the {any-valid-string} you pick, and there are some other caveats in the FAQ. And (as for any server) you would have to assume the Mailinator servers are up and running when needed; otherwise you may get a bounce-back.

Answer 3

How much (if any) control do you have over your e-mail addresses?

If you have none, then the simplest solution might be to set up a hotmail (or similar) account and effectively abandon it.

If you have a lot, then you can add an address to your domain (junk@yourdomain.com) this will then be valid and not generate a bounce. Depending on your mail server you should be able to just delete mails going to this account.

If you want to go this route then asking the question at Server Fault might get you better responses.

I would have posted this a comment, but it got rather long winded

If you do choose to go the create-your-own route, the following .procmailrc script should delete all mail coming to it:

VERBOSE=off
LOGFILE=/dev/null

# delete all mail

:0
/dev/null

(see http://www.beedub.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi/27 for other examples)