About Temp Mail Plus

Temp Mail Plus is a small, independently run service that gives you a working email address the moment you open the page, so that you do not have to hand your real one to every site that demands it.

Why it exists

The web made an email address the price of entry to almost everything. Reading a recipe, downloading a template, comparing two prices, joining a forum for one question - all of it now costs an address, and the address costs you years of mail you never wanted.

Most people solve this badly. They keep a second personal mailbox that slowly fills with the same clutter, or they mistype an address on purpose and never receive the code they needed. A disposable address solves it properly: it exists for one message and then stops existing.

How the address is put together

The name comes from two short word lists and a four digit ending, so it reads as quietriver2841 or mia.reid7395 rather than as a string of noise. That is not decoration. A name shaped like a person's mailbox clears more signup forms than one that looks machine made, and it can still be read out over a phone or typed from memory.

The four digits are a security decision. Guest mailboxes open for whoever knows the address, so the address has to be hard to hit by accident. Ending in two digits would leave about 351 thousand possible names on a domain, which a script walks through in an afternoon along with the mail sitting in them. Ending in four raises it to roughly 35 million, and sweeping the range stops being worth anybody's time.

A short list of names is refused outright. Anything that normally receives mail about the domain itself, such as postmaster, abuse, security or the address printed on our contact page, cannot be claimed. Without that rule the first person to ask would end up reading the notes people send when they want to reach us.

Between the sending server and your screen

Our mail domains take delivery for every possible address rather than for a list of approved ones, which is why a name works a second after it appears. Messages are taken apart at the network edge before they touch our own servers, anything over ten megabytes is discarded there, and what survives arrives as a compact signed record that the application checks before it stores anything.

Message HTML is cleaned on the way in rather than on the way out, because a message is received once and opened many times. Scripts, inline styles and embedded frames are removed permanently at that point, and what is left is displayed in a sandboxed frame that may load images and do nothing else. New mail then appears in the tab you already have open, the instant it is stored, with no page asking on a timer whether something has turned up.

The decisions behind it

Nothing is kept. Mailboxes and messages are deleted automatically after a short life. We hold no archive because an archive of other people's mail is a liability waiting to become an incident.

No account required. Making people register before they can use a free tool is a strange habit of the modern web. Accounts exist here, they are optional, and what they add is listed plainly rather than hidden behind a paywall.

Receiving only. You cannot send from these addresses. That single limit is why the domains keep working: services that allow anonymous sending are used for spam, blocked everywhere, and then useless.

Advertising that stays out of the way. The service is free and paid for by ads. Space for them is reserved in the layout before they load, so nothing jumps under your finger, and no ad is allowed to look like a button.

What registering changes

An account is free and adds four things: ten mailboxes at once instead of one, addresses that last seven days from your most recent sign in, attachments you can actually download, and mailboxes that stay shut to anyone who merely knows the address. Accounts also draw on domains we publish nowhere, which is the only way to hold an address on a domain that is not already being sampled by the people who build blocklists.

It costs a little friction, on purpose. The confirmation link has to be opened within a day or the half finished registration is thrown away, and each sign in afterwards needs a six digit code sent to your own permanent mailbox. An account here holds mail addressed to ten different names, and a password on its own has never been enough to look after that.

Honest limits

A public disposable service cannot be undetectable. Lists of disposable domains are built by looking at services exactly like this one, so any domain shown on this page will eventually appear on such a list. We rotate domains as they burn out, and registered users get domains that are never published anywhere, but no service can promise permanent invisibility. Anyone claiming otherwise has not told you the whole story.

Guest mailboxes are also open by design. No password means no barrier, and no barrier means anyone with the address can read it. For a discount code that is a fair trade. For anything private it is not.

Names come back into circulation, too. A deleted mailbox releases its address, which may later be handed to somebody else, so mail sent months after you finished with a name can land in front of a stranger. Preventing that would mean keeping a permanent register of every address ever issued, and that register is exactly the kind of record a service built on deletion has no business holding.

Contact

Questions, problems and abuse reports: contact page.