Disclaimer

Every complaint that reaches us about disposable email is one of five. Here they are, with the mechanism behind each and what this service can and cannot do about it, so that nothing on this site promises you something it has no way to deliver.

"The site rejected my address"

This is the most common one by a distance, and it is not a fault.

Thousands of sites compare the domain part of an address against public lists of disposable providers. Those lists are rebuilt constantly by people whose whole purpose is finding domains like ours, and any domain that becomes popular gets onto them eventually. A rejection means the check worked, not that anything here broke. The full mechanism, including how a fresh domain is discovered in the first place, is in the detection guide.

What helps: another domain from the list on the front page, since nine are in rotation and they do not burn at the same rate. Or an account, which draws from a pool printed on no page anywhere and therefore reaches the lists considerably later.

What does not help: waiting, refreshing, or writing to us. We cannot alter another company's blocklist and would not be informed if we somehow managed it.

One detail that avoids a wasted evening. Burning out does not switch a domain off in one step. There is a stage in between where the front page no longer offers it and the mail servers still accept everything addressed to it, so an address created yesterday goes on working after the domain has left the dropdown entirely. Nothing is broken there. That domain is simply on its way out.

"The message never arrived"

The other half of the same coin, and harder to see, because nothing visible happens.

A sender who refuses disposable domains normally declines to deliver in silence. No bounce goes back to them, no record appears here, and the confirmation code you keep waiting on was never created in the first place. From where you sit this is indistinguishable from congestion somewhere, and that is why ten minutes of refreshing is the usual response before anyone gives up.

Three other silences are worth knowing about, since they look identical from your side:

The message was too large. Anything over ten megabytes is discarded before it reaches our database, and discarded quietly, because a bounce would confirm to a spammer that the address exists. Ordinary confirmation mail is nowhere near that size, so this affects almost nobody, but it is a real cause.

The mailbox had already expired. An address whose mailbox is gone is an address that does not exist. Mail to it is dropped at the door with no notice to anyone.

The attachment was refused while the message came through. A file over five megabytes, or one of thirty five executable types we never store, is dropped on its own. The message arrives looking oddly empty.

We cannot promise that a given website will deliver to a given address, and no service of this kind can. If nothing has appeared within a couple of minutes, take a different address rather than a longer wait.

"Somebody else read my mail"

For a guest mailbox this is possible, and it follows from the design rather than from a failure.

A guest mailbox has no password on it at all. Knowing the address is the whole of the access control, and the inbox opens for whoever types it correctly. Short, memorable, guessable addresses therefore get opened by people entering likely words on our own front page, which is exactly why the generator does not produce them: every address carries a four digit tail, putting the space per domain above thirty five million rather than the few hundred thousand a shorter one would allow.

That is a reasonable trade for a discount code and a bad one for anything you would rather a stranger did not read.

An account closes this particular hole. Mailboxes belonging to an account are reachable only from that account, and getting into the account takes the password plus a six digit code sent to your real mailbox at every single sign in, not merely on suspicious ones. Sessions live in the database as hashes, so signing out genuinely ends access rather than merely forgetting a cookie.

What an account does not do is turn this into a secure channel. It remains a free service funded by advertising, and it has never been offered as anything else.

"I lost an account because the address expired"

This is the expensive one, and it is the reason this page exists.

Ask one question before using an address from here: might I ever need this to get back into something? Yes or maybe means use your real mailbox. That rules out banking and payments, tax and government portals, work, deliveries, domain registration, cloud storage, and anything holding money or files you would miss.

The numbers are not hidden and they are not generous, because short lifetimes are the product rather than a limitation of it. Twenty four hours is what a guest mailbox gets, counted from your most recent visit to it. An account mailbox gets seven days, counted from your most recent sign in and reset every time you come back. Thirty days is the ceiling on a message no matter how active the account underneath it.

Recovery only works when the mailbox outlives whatever it is meant to rescue. Every address issued here is built for the opposite, and no support desk anywhere restores an account whose recovery address has ceased to exist. Nor can we help at that point: the mailbox is not suspended or archived, it is deleted, along with its messages and their attachments, in a single cascade with no copy kept anywhere. There is no undo, and no version of asking nicely that produces one. If the account matters, give it a real address.

"Something in my inbox was a scam"

Probably, and we did not put it there.

Messages shown here were composed by whoever sent them. Nothing in one is read, reviewed, approved or endorsed at this end, and that goes for every link, offer and attachment it carries. Throwaway addresses attract this by construction: an address that appears on a signup form ends up on lists, and the mail that follows was aimed at an address rather than at you.

What the service does do is narrow: before a message is stored, its HTML is reduced to a whitelist of layout and text tags. Anything executable or presentational leaves with its contents, and links survive only in ordinary web and mail form so that javascript: and data: addresses cannot ride in. Whatever survives is drawn inside a frame isolated from the page around it.

Images are not removed, and you should know it. A tracking pixel is an image one dot across, so opening a message tells its sender that the address is read and when. Stripping images would stop that and would also break the appearance of most honest mail, which is the trade we chose against. Read the subject and the sender from the list if even that is more than you want to reveal.

Ordinary attacks are removed by that. A hostile attachment stays hostile and a fraudulent link stays fraudulent, because neither of those is a rendering problem. Attachments in particular are always delivered as downloads and never displayed in the page, which stops a file executing in our domain but says nothing about what it does on your machine. Treat mail arriving at a throwaway address with the suspicion it has earned, and remember that nobody who knows you sent it.

About the guides on this site

They describe how detection is done, how blocklists get compiled, and how other companies deal with disposable addresses. Those companies revise their rules without announcing it to anyone, least of all to us, so a passage that was correct the week it was published can go stale without a single word on the page changing. Check how something behaves today before you build a decision on our description of it, and write to us through contact when you find one that has drifted.

This is background, not advice about your own situation, and nothing here is legal advice. When the stakes are real, put the question to someone qualified in the country whose rules apply to you, not to a free mail service.

Finally, the service

It costs nothing, it carries no warranty of any sort, and it can be interrupted, altered or discontinued with no notice at all. Anything sitting in a mailbox on that day disappears along with it. The remainder is set out in the terms of use.