About TempMailbox

TempMailbox is run by a small independent team that operates the mail infrastructure, writes the guides and answers the mail sent to us. There is no support tier, no sales department and nobody between you and the people who decide which domain gets retired this month.

The service is one thing, and it is small

We accept mail at addresses on domains we control, show it to you, and delete it. That is the mechanism in full. An address is live the second it appears on your screen, incoming messages are stripped of scripts and remote content before being rendered in an isolated frame, and they reach the page over a connection that is already open rather than by the browser asking again every few seconds.

Then the clock runs out and the mailbox goes. Nothing here is archived, and the design keeps that promise cheap: we cannot hand over what we no longer store, and we never attached it to a name in the first place.

Why most of this site is about a mailbox we do not run

Look at the menu and you will find twenty procedures about your permanent mailbox, and roughly one page about ours. That is deliberate.

The disposable inbox on the front page solves exactly one problem: the form that demands an address before it will let you past. It is a compartment, not a mailbox. Everything else in your mail life happens somewhere we have no part in: the account holding your password resets, the filters that never worked, the storage quota nobody warned you about, the recovery phone number from two phones ago.

Nobody ships a maintenance manual for that account. Providers publish help articles per feature, which is not the same as telling you in what order to do things and what it costs you to skip one. So the guides are written as procedures with a price in minutes and a stated failure you avoid by following them. We would rather be the site that fixed your real mailbox than the site that talked you into replacing it.

What we are good for and what we are not

Running mail infrastructure means watching our own domains age in public. A domain enters rotation, gets sampled by the services that build disposable domain lists, starts failing at a growing share of signup forms, and is retired. We can see how long each stage takes, and that experience is worth writing down.

It also makes some claims impossible for us to make honestly:

No sending, ever. Addresses here receive and nothing more, in every version there will ever be. Anonymous sending would make this a spam relay within a week and take the receiving side down with it.

A guest mailbox has no lock. The address is the only key. Somebody typing a likely word into the box on our front page will land in a stranger's mail occasionally, and there is no fix for that short of an account.

Domains fail without notice. A form that accepted your address in March can refuse it in April, and there is nobody to appeal to, because the decision belongs to a list we have no relationship with.

It cannot hold anything you need to get back into. Banking, government, employment, shipping, domain registration, anything with money or files behind it. A recovery address has to outlive the account it protects, and every address we issue is built to expire. The disclaimer covers the edges of that.

How it stays free

Advertising, and only advertising. There is no paid plan waiting behind a countdown, which means nothing here is broken on purpose to make an upgrade look attractive. Ads occupy space reserved before they load so the page does not move under your finger, and none of them are permitted to look like a control on the site.

Corrections are welcome and get acted on. If a guide names a menu that your provider has since moved, or gets a retention period wrong, tell us through the contact page and we will check it against the running product rather than argue.