Questions About Disposable Email

A signup form said this address is not allowed. What does that mean?

One website consulted one list of domains and found the part after the at sign on it. Mail to the address still arrives normally, and other sites with a different list, or no list at all, will keep accepting it. Choosing another domain and trying again usually settles it in seconds.

Asking a blocklist to remove a domain does not work, because the entry is accurate and everyone involved knows it. The layers a form can run through are described in how sites check an address.

How long does a mailbox on this site stay alive?

Signed out, a day, measured from whenever you last opened it, and asking for a replacement address destroys the earlier one immediately rather than on some delay. Signed in to a free account, the mailbox holds for a week past your most recent visit, and no single message inside it lasts beyond thirty days whatever else happens.

What happens to mail that arrives after the mailbox is gone?

It is dropped on arrival and never written down anywhere. Nothing is sent back to whoever mailed it either, because a reply saying the address is unknown would tell an outsider which addresses on our domains are real and which are not.

Can any of this be traced back to me?

The address itself leads nowhere: we never asked for your name, your phone or another mailbox, so there is nothing stored to connect it to. Everything around the address is a different story. The site you signed up to sees your IP address and your browser, Cloudflare terminates connections in front of us and sees visitor addresses under its own retention rules, and your internet provider knows who was behind a given connection.

The full chain, including what our own database has no field for, is laid out in what can and cannot be traced.

Is it legal to use an address like this?

Yes, in every jurisdiction we are aware of. No law prohibits receiving mail at an address that expires. What can be unlawful is a specific act committed while using one, and that act would be equally unlawful from a permanent mailbox.

A site's own terms are a separate layer with separate consequences: they can forbid something the law permits, and the penalty is a closed account rather than a court. The distinction is worked through in the piece on legality, and the most common case, opening a second account somewhere, gets its own guide.

Why does the address I am given not use this site's own domain?

Because that domain burns through its useful life quicker than any other we hold. The name of the site is printed on every page a scraper walks through, which puts it on the blocklists ahead of the rest of the stock, and unlike the rest of the stock it cannot be quietly swapped for a fresh one, since replacing it would mean relocating the entire website. So addresses are issued from the rotating pool, and that pool gets restocked as its members burn out.

What does registering change?

Four things, and signing up costs nothing. Ten simultaneous mailboxes rather than a single one. A set of domains that appears on no public page anywhere. Attachments that actually work. And mailboxes tied to your account instead of to whoever happens to know the address.

That second item is the one people undervalue. Nothing displayed publicly means nothing for a scraper to collect, which buys those domains a much longer working life before any blocklist catches up with them, and that is precisely why they sit behind a sign in rather than on the front page.

Who else can open a guest mailbox?

Anybody who types the same address into the field. There is no password and no owner on a guest mailbox: knowing the address is the entire key, and a short name somebody chose by hand will be guessed eventually. Where the contents are a discount code, none of that costs you anything. Where the contents are something you would not read aloud on a train, sign in first, because a mailbox held by an account is private to it.

Can a deleted or expired message be brought back?

No. Nothing is archived, nothing is backed up, and no recycle bin exists, which leaves no source to restore from sixty seconds after the deletion happened. Deliberate rather than careless: whatever can produce your old mail on demand can be compelled to produce somebody else's on demand too.

Can I reply to a message or send mail from my address?

No, and this will not change later. Addresses here receive and nothing more. Anonymous sending would turn the service into a spam relay in a matter of days, its domains would be refused everywhere in a matter of weeks, and the receiving side would go down along with them.

Is there an API or any way to automate this?

No, and none is planned. Scripted address generation is the single fastest way to burn a domain, and every domain burned that way is one fewer working address for people using the site by hand. If you need mail in an automated test, run a local mail catcher, which is better suited to it anyway.

Can I use this for a bank, a government portal or an employer?

No. Anything you might need to get back into needs an address that outlives the account, and this one is built to do the opposite. The same goes for shipping, domain registration, healthcare and anything attached to money or identity.

What belongs there is a mailbox you keep, or a forwarding alias you control, and the gap between the various kinds of throwaway address comes down mostly to how long each of them survives.

Are attachments available?

On a free account, yes. A file travels in with its message, gets put away in separate storage, and goes in the same sweep that removes the message, so nothing attached ever survives the mail that brought it. Guests see the text of a message and not the files.

Two limits worth knowing before you rely on this. Anything above five megabytes is refused on its own while the message still lands, which is why a heavy deck can arrive as an oddly bare covering note. And a list of thirty five executable formats is refused outright, exe, msi, bat, ps1, vbs, jar, apk and dmg among them, on the grounds that a disposable inbox is the last place on earth anyone ought to be running a stranger's program.

What does this cost?

Nothing. The service is free, an account is free, and there is no paid tier waiting behind a trial countdown. Advertising pays for it, placed so that it never covers the interface or shifts the page while you are reading.

Free is a business model rather than a favour, and the models differ sharply in what they do with your mail, which is why who pays for a free inbox is worth knowing before you pick any service in this category.