Terms of Use

Last updated: 6 August 2026.

House rules for TempMailbox, in the order they come up. Using the site means you have accepted them. Nothing here is unusual for a free inbox, but it is all written down so that neither side has to guess later.

1. The inbox, and what it is worth

You take an address, mail lands in it, the clock runs out, everything goes. That sentence is the entire product, and these rules describe its edges.

It costs nothing. No account is required, and none of the numbers on the about page are guarantees. They describe how the system behaves today, which is a different kind of statement from a promise.

2. Receiving works, sending does not

There is no way to send from an address created here, and no release will add one.

Services that let anonymous visitors send mail become spam relays within days. Their domains are refused by receiving servers within weeks, and at that point incoming mail stops arriving as well. The restriction is the reason the inbox half of this site keeps working at all.

If you received something that appears to come from a TempMailbox domain, it was forged elsewhere. Sender addresses are trivial to fake and doing so requires no access to the domain being imitated. The contact page says what to send us if you are reporting one.

3. Do it by hand

No API exists. Nothing on this site is meant to be called from a program, scripted through a headless browser, or scraped.

The reason is the domains. Every public domain here has a working life measured in months, and mass address creation is the exact behaviour that ends it early. A single automated run can retire a domain that thousands of people were using comfortably. Requests that look mechanical are throttled, then refused.

Creating hundreds of addresses by hand is the same breach at a slower speed. The volume is what matters, not the method.

4. Where the line is

You may not use this service to:

1. do anything the law where you live forbids;
2. threaten, harass, defraud or impersonate another person;
3. receive material that is illegal to possess;
4. evade a ban or open accounts in bulk against another site's rules;
5. probe, overload or interfere with the service itself;
6. go looking through mailboxes that are not yours.

The last one deserves a sentence of its own. Guest mailboxes have no password by design, and that is a limitation to work around rather than a door held open for you. Typing plausible addresses to see what arrives is a breach of these rules, whatever the technical reality allows.

5. What we are allowed to do

Delete any mailbox, at any moment, without saying which or why. Block an address, a domain or a stream of traffic that behaves badly. Retire a mail domain and stop issuing addresses on it.

These are the tools for keeping a free service standing, not a disciplinary system. They are pointed at automation almost every time they are used.

6. What we are not promising

Read this section twice if you are about to use an address for something that matters.

Uptime. None is committed. The service can be slow, interrupted or entirely down, with no notice before or explanation after.

Arrival. Many senders quietly refuse disposable domains, and we usually cannot detect the attempt. A verification code that never shows up is this far more often than a failure on our side, and switching domains is the fix that actually works.

Permanence. The service can change shape or close. Everything held in every mailbox ends with it.

Suitability. Do not put an address from here on an account you will one day need to recover: banking, employment, government, deliveries, domain names, cloud storage. A recovery address has to outlive the account it protects, and this one is engineered to do the opposite. The disclaimer is where that line is drawn.

7. Accounts

Registering is free and adds four things: mailboxes that last from your last sign in rather than your last visit, ten of them instead of one, domains that are never printed on the front page, and attachments. It also puts a password on your mailboxes, which is the only one of the four that changes what the service is rather than how convenient it is.

There is no paid tier above the free account and none is planned. The password is the whole of the protection, so whoever holds it holds every mailbox in the account. Accounts used to break these rules are closed.

8. Advertising

Ads pay for all of this. Two rules govern them here, and they are stricter than the ad network requires.

Space is reserved before an ad loads, so nothing on the page moves once it arrives. And no ad may be shaped to look like part of the site. A layout that earns by making advertising indistinguishable from controls earns from mistakes, and this site does not take that money.

9. Liability

To the fullest extent the law where you live allows, we are not liable for any loss connected to this service: messages that never came, messages that came and were deleted, accounts locked out because their address expired, or what follows from somebody else opening a guest mailbox. If a court decides some liability cannot be excluded, it stops at what you have paid us, which is nothing.

10. Changes

These rules will change as the service does. The date at the top moves and the new version applies from that moment.

Nobody will write to you about it. Using the site after a change is how you accept it, so look here occasionally if the rules matter to you. Anything materially stricter than what you have just read will be stated plainly at the top rather than folded into a paragraph in the middle.

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