The temporary email generator hack to send Sitecore XM Cloud email invitation for testers

With the advent of Sitecore XM Cloud, it is quiet familiar that the user creation process now better called as user invitation process has undergone a change. As with every blog post, here is a depiction of XM vs XM Cloud user creation flow:

XM:

It is by now history that a Sitecore administrator creates and allots access to the user:

XM Cloud:

Two parts:

1. Organization Admin invites other email addresses from portal 

2. Assigns roles for the user in the Sitecore User manager

Note that the Sitecore XM User manager accepts a user name for user creation and consecutive login to the instance while XM Cloud needs a valid email address to login. In other words, through the Sitecore user manager, you can't create a user name that has email address characters like @ and dot. So, in scenarios wherein you need to have a bunch of user testing the application in Sitecore XM Cloud environment, you would need a bunch of valid email addresses. Those email addresses can be invited and once the email invitation is accepted, user gets created in Sitecore User manager. After this, the admin can login and assign roles to the concerned user. Then, the email address can be distributed to actual user.

XM Cloud vs XM:

This is where temporary email addresses could be useful. Here is the user invitation process with the temporary email creation process:

Note that with these temporary email address (or this) generators, an email box is attached and available till the time of the session. So, keep this window open until you receive the invitation email from XMC Portal for that random email address:

With that randomly generated email, you can use the address to send invite emails from the XMC portal to access different environments or apps. In the following case, I just want to invite the user access only one XMC environment:

After sending the invitation, if you refresh the temporary email inbox for the email address, you must see the invitation email and should be able to accept the invitation:

After acceptance, you will be redirected to login in the browser and you can now register by providing a password of choice:

On clicking Continue, you are supposed to complete the profile details:

Then, once you accept the terms and conditions page, you will be redirected to the environment:

Now, in order to see if the user is created in Sitecore and assign role for the created user,  if you login as admin in the Sitecore instance, you should be able to find the new user and can allot roles as per need:

Once you allot the roles, this user is ready for distribution.

So, the new flow with the use of this hack:

Use this hack only for testing the environment with internal users since there is a breach of password security here. Also, after use, be sure to remove access for the email addresses from the portal: