Disclaimer

TempMailbox is for mail you do not intend to keep. This page draws the line around that sentence, because almost every bad experience with a throwaway inbox comes from the same mistake: using one in a place that quietly required a permanent mailbox.

The test, before you paste the address anywhere

One question, and it takes a second: if I lose access to this address, does anything of mine become unreachable?

A yes rules the address out. So does a maybe. What is left after that test is the entire proper use of this service: signup walls, one-off downloads, forum registrations, discount codes, trials you will not renew, anything where the mail matters for an hour and never again.

Where a temporary mailbox will cost you

Banking and payment accounts. Tax and government portals. Anything connected to work. Deliveries and marketplaces. Domain registration. Cloud storage holding files you would miss. Any subscription that renews by itself.

The mechanism is the same in every case. A recovery address has to outlive the account it protects, and this address is engineered to expire on a schedule. When the mailbox goes, the reset link has nowhere to arrive, and a support department that cannot mail you a code has no way to establish that the account was ever yours. The account is not locked; it is orphaned. Nobody at this service can undo that, because the mailbox no longer exists to be restored.

What "no lock" actually means

A guest mailbox has no password. The address is the only thing standing between its contents and anyone else, and short memorable addresses are guessed routinely by people typing likely words into our own front page.

Read guest mail as though it were pinned to a noticeboard. That is a fine deal for a discount code and a poor one for anything you would mind a stranger reading. Registering closes this specific gap, because mailboxes under an account are private to that account, but it does not turn a free advertising-funded service into a secure channel, and none of these pages has ever claimed it does.

What we do not vouch for

Mail displayed here was written by whoever sent it. We do not read it, review it, endorse it, or stand behind any link, offer or attachment inside it.

Scripts, stylesheets and frames are removed before a message is shown, which stops the usual attacks. Images are kept, so a tracking pixel still reports that the message was opened: blocking images would break how ordinary mail looks, and that trade was made knowingly. None of it makes a hostile attachment safe or a fraudulent link honest. Nothing arriving at a throwaway address was sent by somebody who knows you, and it deserves the suspicion that implies.

Delivery, which is outside anyone's control here

Many senders refuse to deliver to known disposable domains, and the lists they check are rewritten weekly by people looking specifically for services like this one. A message may simply never leave their side, and we usually have no way to know that it was attempted.

Nothing on this site can promise that a particular website will accept a particular address. When a code does not turn up within a minute or two, another domain solves it more often than patience does.

About the guides

Most of this site explains how to run a real mailbox: folders and filters at Gmail, Outlook, Apple and Proton, storage, aliases, what to keep and what to delete. Those are other companies' products. They rename settings, move menus and change retention rules without telling anybody, so a procedure that was exact when written can drift out of date without a single word on this site changing.

Check what the provider's own screen says before doing anything irreversible, especially anything involving deletion, and tell us through the contact page when you find a step that no longer matches.

It is general information rather than advice about your circumstances, and it is not legal advice. Where the stakes are real, ask somebody qualified where you live.

Two habits that prevent most of this

The first costs nothing: before you close the tab, copy anything you will want later out of the mailbox. A confirmation number, a licence key, an order reference. The mailbox is a delivery point, not a filing cabinet, and there is no version of this service where the contents survive a week of neglect.

The second is about naming. A short memorable local part is easier to type back and easier for somebody else to guess; a generated one is neither. If the mail you are expecting has any value at all, take the random name the site offers rather than typing your own.

Both habits assume the same thing about this service: that it will forget you, on schedule, without asking. That is the promise it actually makes, and the only one it keeps in every case.

The service itself

Free, without warranty of any kind, and open to interruption, change or shutdown without notice. Whatever is in a mailbox at that moment goes with it. The terms of use cover the rest.