Disposable email addresses: temporary inboxes and aliases

Every form that asks for an email address is a small privacy decision. Hand over your main address and it may end up in a marketing list, get sold, or leak in a breach years later. Disposable addresses solve this in two different ways. A temporary inbox is a short-lived mailbox, often readable by anyone, that you use once and forget. An alias is a separate address that forwards to your real inbox and can be switched off when it starts attracting spam.

Where a throwaway address fits

• Downloading a white paper or a free ebook that sits behind a sign-up form.
• Joining a forum or a Wi-Fi portal you do not expect to use again.
• Testing your own website or app, where you need many fresh addresses to try registration and password-reset flows.

Where it does not

Never use a temporary inbox for banking, shopping, work, or any account holding your data or money. Password resets go to that address, and if the inbox has been wiped or someone else can read it, the account is gone. Many services also block known disposable domains at sign-up, and using throwaway addresses to get around a ban or to pose as someone else breaks the terms of nearly every site. Treat these tools as spam protection.

There is also a privacy limit worth knowing. A temporary inbox hides your real address from the site you sign up to, but it does not make you anonymous. The site still sees your IP address and browser, and the inbox provider can see what arrives. For anything sensitive, a separate permanent account with a provider you trust is the better tool.

Temporary inbox services

These need no registration. You pick or receive an address, and mail sent to it shows up in the browser.

YOPmail

Type any name and you get that name at yopmail.com. There is no password, so anyone who guesses the same name can read the inbox. Messages are kept for eight days and then deleted. It is quick for receiving a confirmation link and nothing more.

Guerrilla Mail

Guerrilla Mail hands you a random address, or lets you pick one, and deletes all mail an hour after it arrives. It can also send messages and attachments from the temporary address, which is handy for replying to a confirmation that needs an answer.

10 Minute Mail

The address works for ten minutes, which is enough to receive a sign-up link. A button extends the time if the message is slow to arrive. After that the inbox disappears.

Mailinator

Mailinator is openly public: every inbox on its main domain can be read, and deleted, by anyone who types the name. Nothing you care about should go there. Its paid plans give development and QA teams private domains and an API for reading test messages automatically, which is why it shows up in many testing setups. The Mailinator FAQ explains the public and private models.

Dispostable

A simple public inbox at dispostable.com, similar to YOPmail. You pick a name, check for mail, and move on. Like YOPmail, it has no password, so choose a long, random name if you want the message to stay unseen for the few minutes you need it.

Aliases that forward to your own inbox

Aliases take a minute longer to set up and are the better choice for anything you might use again.

Plus addressing

Many providers, Gmail included, deliver mail sent to an address like yourname+shop@gmail.com to the normal yourname inbox. Sign up to a shop with that tagged address and every message from it carries that tag, so you can filter it, and if the tagged address starts getting spam you know who leaked it. The convention is described in the mail standard RFC 5233 as subaddressing. Some sign-up forms reject the plus sign, and a spammer can strip the tag, so it offers tracking more than protection.

33mail

33mail, running since 2010, gives you a personal subdomain. Any address at that subdomain forwards to your real inbox, so you can invent a new one for every site on the spot without logging in first. When an alias starts attracting spam you block it, and the rest keep working.