Privacy Policy

Last updated: 6 August 2026.

A privacy policy is usually a list of what a company collects. This one is organised the other way round, by where your data physically sits, because that is what determines who can reach it and what happens when something goes wrong.

In your browser

One random string, generated here, stored on your device. It is how the site recognises the same guest between visits and shows you the mailbox you already had. It is not derived from anything about you, it says nothing about you, and it is meaningless to any other site that might somehow read it.

Alongside it sit cookies from Google, placed by the advertising and by the visitor counter. Google and its partners may use those to select ads based on where you have been before, here and elsewhere. You can turn personalised advertising off at Google Ads Settings or block the cookies outright; the mailbox behaves identically either way, and nothing on this site holds a page hostage until you agree to something.

In our database

Four kinds of row, and no others.

The mailbox: its address, the domain it sits on and the moment it expires. The messages in it, with sender, subject, headers, body and attachments, kept so they can be displayed. The account, if you made one: an email address and a password hash, never the password itself, which cannot be worked back out of the hash. The session, so signing in once is enough.

Now the part that matters more than the list. There is no column anywhere in that schema for an IP address. Not on mailboxes, not on messages, not on accounts, not on sessions. Your address exists in memory for as long as it takes to answer a request and then it is gone, because nothing was ever built to write it down.

Message content is not read to target advertising. It is not sold. It is not passed to anyone.

On the server, outside the database

Nothing that concerns you, and that is deliberate.

The web server in front of the application has no logging configured, so no file records which page was requested from which address at which second. Most sites keep exactly that for months without thinking about it.

The counter that stops one visitor demanding a thousand addresses a minute lives in process memory and never touches disk. Restart the application and it is empty.

None of that makes you anonymous on the internet at large. The next section names the companies that do see you.

With other companies

Cloudflare terminates every connection before it reaches us, filters attacks and serves cached files. It therefore sees the address of every visitor and holds aggregate traffic figures that we can read as counts and graphs. That processing happens under Cloudflare's terms, not ours.

Cloudflare Turnstile protects the registration and password forms by looking for automation in the browser. No traffic lights to identify, and the result does not feed an advertising profile.

Amazon SES delivers password reset mail, and nothing else, from a separate sending domain.

Google provides the advertising and the visitor counts.

What Google's counter receives is worth stating precisely, because this is the one place where a mail service could quietly leak everything. It is told that a mailbox was created, that an address was copied, that a message arrived, that somebody registered or signed in. Each of those is a number. The address never goes there. No part of a message goes there: not the sender, not the subject, not a line of the body, not a filename.

In the hands of whoever knows the address

This is the one that surprises people, so it gets its own heading.

A guest mailbox has no password. Anyone who types its address into this site sees what is inside. That is not a flaw to be patched, it is the direct consequence of a mailbox that requires no account: there is no identity to check against.

Practically, treat guest mail as readable by strangers. If you would mind somebody else reading it, sign in and use a mailbox that belongs to an account, where nobody but you can open it.

Nowhere at all, after the clock runs out

Three clocks run here, and none of them can be paused.

The guest clock is the shortest: twenty four hours from the last time you looked at the mailbox, and zero seconds if you ask for a different address, which wipes the old one on the spot.

The account clock counts from your last sign in and gives a mailbox a week. The message clock runs inside it and gives any single message a month at most. An attachment has no clock of its own; it goes when its message does.

When a clock stops, the row leaves the database. There is no archive, no backup holding a second copy, no extract kept for analysis. After the cleanup job has run, that message cannot be produced for you, for an advertiser, or for anybody turning up with a legal demand, because there is nowhere left to read it from.

That is the whole privacy argument of this service in one paragraph. A system that holds nothing has nothing to leak, and a mail service that accumulated years of other people's correspondence would be carrying the largest liability in this business.

If you are in the EU or the UK

The GDPR gives you the right to see what is held, to have it put right, to have it deleted, and to take a complaint to your national supervisory authority. All four apply here.

In practice the first right returns very little for a guest, because the list at the top of this page is the whole of it. The third right you can exercise yourself in a second: ask for a new address and the old mailbox is destroyed immediately, or close the account in your settings and everything attached to it leaves in one operation. Neither needs a letter, an identity check or a wait.

Children

Nothing here is designed for or advertised to children, and no information about anyone under 13 is held knowingly. A message telling us that a child has an account is enough to have it deleted; no proof or paperwork is asked for.

Changes

When this page changes the date at the top changes with it, and any change to what is collected is written out in sentences rather than folded into a list.

Questions: hello@tempmailbox.net or the contact page.