Disposable email
by TempMaily
A real address that isn't yours: receive codes, links, and confirmations without exposing your inbox. No signup, no phone number — it expires on its own in 24 hours.
by TempMaily
A real address that isn't yours: receive codes, links, and confirmations without exposing your inbox. No signup, no phone number — it expires on its own in 24 hours.
Every address you type into a form is a permanent handle on you. It gets stored, shared with "partners," enriched into marketing profiles — and eventually breached: Have I Been Pwned indexes over 17 billion breached accounts. A disposable address inverts the deal: the sender gets a working address, and you give away nothing that outlives the transaction.
The mail itself is part of the problem. When researchers analyzed 2.3 million messages sent to disposable inboxes, roughly a quarter contained tracking pixels or tracked links that report when and where you open them. TempMaily renders messages in a sandboxed frame that strips scripts and blocks those trackers — the mail works, the surveillance doesn't. More on what temp mail can and can't protect in is temporary email safe.
One test decides: if losing the address tomorrow would cost you anything, don't use a disposable one.
The long-form version of this line is temporary vs permanent email.
Mostly, yes. Disposable email is the umbrella term; temp mail emphasizes the expiry, burner email the use-once-and-destroy intent, and a fake email generator is what people call the tool when they mainly want an address a form will accept. They all resolve to the same object: a real, receiving inbox with no identity attached.
The one genuinely different tool is the email alias — a permanent forwarding address for accounts you intend to keep. If you're choosing between them, email alias vs temp mail draws the boundary.
Three walls people hit: a form rejects the shared domain, an inbox needs to outlive 24 hours, or a workflow needs mail readable by code. Premium removes all three — custom domains off every blocklist, password-protected inboxes with no expiry, forwarding, and the API — for $9.90/mo or $90/year.
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Custom domain, up to 10 addresses, 2GB storage, no ads — from $7.50/mo billed yearly.
A disposable email address is a real, working address you use briefly and then discard. It receives normal email — verification codes, confirmation links, download links — but it is not connected to your identity and it expires on its own, so the mail and the address leave no trail back to your real inbox. Temp mail, burner email, and throwaway email are all names for the same idea.
The service owns a pool of domains and runs a mail server that accepts messages for any address on them. When you load the page, it assigns you an address; anything sent to that address appears in the inbox in front of you in real time. There is no account and no password on the free tier — possession of the inbox page is what grants access — and after the expiry window (24 hours at TempMaily) the inbox and its messages are deleted.
Yes. Keeping your real address out of a signup form is a normal privacy practice, the same as declining marketing checkboxes. What stays illegal is what you do with any tool: fraud, ban evasion, and harassment don't become legal through a throwaway address. Some sites choose to block disposable domains — that is their right, and it is a compatibility question, not a legality one.
No — and this is the honest boundary of the whole category. Any account you may need to recover (banking, government, your Apple or Google ID, anything holding money or purchases) must live on a permanent address, because account recovery flows send reset links to the address on file, and a disposable inbox will be gone. Disposable is for signups whose loss costs you nothing.
The site checks signup domains against public blocklists of known disposable domains, and every popular shared domain lands on those lists eventually. If a form rejects your address, you can try again later with a different shared domain — or solve it permanently with a custom domain, which no blocklist has ever seen because it belongs to you alone. That is a TempMaily Premium feature.
An alias (SimpleLogin, Apple Hide My Email) is a permanent address that forwards into your real inbox — right for accounts you keep, because you can revoke it if it leaks. A disposable address is isolated: nothing forwards anywhere, your real inbox is never involved, and the address dies on its own. Aliases protect an ongoing relationship; disposable email avoids starting one.