What goes wrong with a shared inbox
- Collisions. Two testers request codes at the same moment. One of them uses the other’s code, and the bug report that follows wastes an afternoon.
- Aliases nobody can trace.
qa+client-a-checkout-3@agency.commade sense to someone in March. Now it’s one of 400 and nobody knows its password. - Real-mailbox risk. A shared Gmail is a real account with a real password, recovery options and sometimes access to other things. It’s often shared in a chat message.
- It isn’t what users do. Plus-addresses are rejected or normalised by some forms, and a long-lived Gmail gets filtered differently from a brand-new user’s address.
What to do instead
Give every test its own address. With Proxy Mail QA:
- Each tester creates their own addresses, as many as they need, privately.
- Every address is new and has never received mail before, like a real new user.
- Projects keep clients apart, with the site you’re testing one click away and an optional prefix so addresses are easy to recognise, such as
cnn-k3f9q2m8x7aa@mailclub.dev. - Notes, tags, personas and saved passwords live on the address, so the context is never in a spreadsheet.
- Addresses expire on their own, after 1 to 7 days, and their mail is deleted. Old names are never reused, so nobody else can ever receive a reset email for your test accounts.