Privacy Policy

Last updated: 4 August 2026.

Written by reading the running system rather than a template, so it is specific where most policies hedge. Where something surprising is true, it is stated outright instead of being softened.

Records that do not exist

There is no web server access log. The server in front of the application was configured without a logging directive, so no file anywhere records which page was requested, from which address, at which second. Most websites keep exactly that for months by default, which is why it is worth saying plainly.

No IP address is stored in our database. The schema has no column for one: not on a mailbox, not on a message, not on an account. An address exists in memory for the duration of a request and is gone when the request ends.

Rate limiting writes nothing down. The counter that stops one visitor demanding a thousand addresses a minute lives inside the running process and never touches disk. Restart the application and it is empty again.

None of this makes you anonymous on the internet, and the next section explains who does see you.

What is stored while the service is in use

The mailbox address, because arriving mail needs a destination to be filed under.

A random identifier held in your browser, which is how the site recognises your guest mailbox when you come back. It is not derived from anything about you and means nothing to any other website.

Messages delivered to that mailbox: sender, subject, headers, body and any attachments, kept so they can be displayed to you. Message content is not scanned to target advertising and is not sold or shared.

For an account, an email address and a password hash. The password itself is never written down and cannot be reconstructed from the hash. Your address is used to sign you in and to receive password resets, and for nothing else.

Everything is deleted on a clock

A guest mailbox and its contents are removed twenty four hours after they were last used, and immediately when you request a new address. With a free account a mailbox survives seven days from your last sign in, and an individual message is kept up to thirty days inside that. An attachment lives exactly as long as the message it arrived with.

Deletion is real. Nothing is archived, nothing is backed up, no copy is set aside for analysis or research. Once the cleanup job has run, the message cannot be produced for you, for an advertiser or for anyone turning up with a demand.

Other companies involved

Cloudflare sits in front of this website. It terminates the connection, absorbs attacks and serves cached files, which means it does see the IP address of every visitor and keeps aggregate traffic statistics that we can view as counts and graphs. That processing runs under Cloudflare's own privacy terms rather than ours.

Cloudflare Turnstile protects the registration and password forms by watching for signs of automation in the browser. It does not ask you to identify traffic lights and does not feed anything into an advertising profile.

Amazon SES delivers password reset messages, sent from a separate domain kept apart from the mail domains.

Google supplies the advertising through AdSense and the visitor counts through Google Analytics 4.

Cookies and advertising

AdSense and Analytics both set cookies in your browser. Google and its partners may use them to show you advertising based on earlier visits to this site and to others. You can turn personalised advertising off at Google Ads Settings or block the cookies in your browser: the mailbox works the same either way, and nothing here demands you accept a cookie before reading a page or receiving a message.

Analytics tells us how many people opened a page and roughly where they arrived from. It does not tell us who they are.

A guest mailbox is open to whoever knows the address

This belongs in a privacy policy rather than in small print, because it is the single fact people misjudge. Guest mailboxes carry no password, so the address is the whole of the security, and short memorable addresses do get guessed. Treat guest mail as readable by strangers. Mailboxes under an account are private to that account.

If you are in the EEA or the UK

You can ask what personal data we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or erased, object to processing, and complain to your national data protection authority. For guest use the honest answer is close to nothing: an address, its messages and a random browser identifier, all of which delete themselves shortly anyway.

If you hold an account, deleting it in your settings removes the address, the password hash and every mailbox and message attached to it in one action. That is faster than writing to us and needs no correspondence at all.

Advertising cookies are handled separately: where consent is required for them, it is asked for before those cookies are set, and refusing costs you nothing except personalisation.

Children

Nothing here is designed for or directed at children, and we hold no information about anyone under 13 knowingly. Tell us if you think a child has opened an account and it will be deleted along with everything in it.

Changes

When this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change in what is collected will be described here in words, not absorbed quietly into a paragraph.

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