How Long a Mailbox Lasts

Most services are vague about this. Here are the actual rules, why each one is set where it is, and what to do if you need longer.

The rules

Without an account, you have one address. It lives while you use it and is deleted after twenty four hours with no activity. Opening the page, reading a message or receiving one all count as activity and start the clock again.

Requesting a new address removes the previous one at once, along with every message it held. This is instant and cannot be undone.

With an account, you may keep up to ten addresses at once. They and their messages are deleted seven days after your last sign in. No individual message survives longer than thirty days, even if you sign in daily.

Why these numbers

Twenty four hours for guests covers the realistic case. Somebody signs up for something, gets a code, and is finished within minutes. A smaller number would break the one common exception, which is coming back the next morning for a message that arrived overnight. A larger number would mean holding mail nobody will ever open.

Immediate deletion on replacement exists because that is what the button means. If you ask for a new address, you are finished with the old one. Keeping it alive quietly would be storing mail you believe is already gone.

Seven days from last sign in for accounts ties the lifetime to actual use. An account visited weekly keeps its addresses indefinitely. One abandoned in March is gone by the end of the month, without us having to guess.

Thirty days maximum for any message stops an active account becoming an archive. Someone who signs in every day would otherwise accumulate mail forever, which is precisely the situation we are avoiding.

Why so short

Because storage is a liability, not a feature.

Every message kept is a message that can leak. Services that hold years of other people's mail eventually explain how it escaped, and no explanation makes their users whole. The safest data is the data that no longer exists.

There is also a practical reason. The service we replaced held years of accumulated mail and attachments, none of it ever read again, all of it costing money and slowing everything down. Deleting aggressively keeps the service fast and free.

Keeping an address longer

Sign in periodically. For an account, any sign in resets the seven day clock on every address you own.

Do not press for a new address. The commonest reason people lose a mailbox is pressing the button while waiting for a message.

Move to a permanent address instead. If you find yourself needing a temporary address to survive for weeks, you do not need a temporary address. You need an alias, which lasts until you switch it off.

What resets the clock and what does not

Resets it: opening the page with that mailbox, reading a message, receiving a message. Any of these counts as activity and gives the guest mailbox another full day.

Does not reset it: having the tab open in the background without the connection alive, bookmarking the address, or writing it down. The clock follows use, not intent.

For accounts, only signing in matters. Opening a mailbox while already signed in does not extend anything, because the seven days are counted from the last sign in and apply to every mailbox you own at once.

Why the countdown is on screen

The time remaining is shown next to the address deliberately. Most people who lose a mailbox lose it because they were unsure whether it would still be there, got impatient, and pressed for a new address while waiting for a message.

Seeing twenty three hours left answers that question before it turns into a mistake. It is also the honest way to present the service: the disappearance is the product, not a limitation of it.

Planning around the limits

Signing up for something now, expecting mail later. If a service sends anything after the initial confirmation, such as a shipping notice or a licence key, a guest mailbox will not be there for it. Register first, or use a permanent alias.

Sharing an address with somebody else. Fine within a day, unreliable after. If two people need to see the same messages next week, that is an alias forwarding to a real mailbox, not this.

Coming back tomorrow morning. Works, provided nothing else touched the mailbox. This is the common case the twenty four hour window exists for.

Coming back next week. Register. It is free and takes a moment, and seven days from each sign in is designed for exactly this.

Ending a mailbox early

Both clocks are upper limits rather than minimums. When you have finished with an address, you do not have to wait for it to time out.

As a guest, that is precisely what the new address button does: the current mailbox and everything in it goes at the moment you press it, and a fresh address takes its place. There is no separate delete control, because there is nothing else the button could reasonably mean.

Signed in, the two actions come apart. Creating an address adds to your ten and leaves the others untouched, and any address in the list can be removed on its own, taking its messages and stored files with it and affecting nothing else.

That is worth doing rather than waiting. If an address was given to a form that turned out to sell its list, removing it the same evening stops the rest of the sequence arriving, and it frees a slot when you are already holding ten.

Reading the countdown correctly

The figure beside the address is the current deadline, not a fixed value set when the mailbox was created. Anything counting as use pushes it back to a full day, so watching it fall for an hour and then reloading gives you the whole twenty four hours again.

Cleanup itself runs on a schedule rather than at the exact second, at present every ten minutes. A mailbox therefore tends to vanish within a few minutes of its deadline and can occasionally sit there slightly past it. Treat the deadline as the moment access ends and never plan on those extra minutes, because they are an implementation detail rather than a grace period.

What the thirty day cap looks like in practice

For an account used regularly, the mailboxes persist and the messages do not. An address created in April and signed into every week is still yours in June, but the message that arrived on the day you created it left thirty days later.

The effect is a mailbox that stays valid while its contents roll forward. That is the intended shape: a durable address for receiving, with no history piling up behind it.

What deletion actually means

It is removal, not archiving. The mailbox row, its messages and any stored attachments are deleted together. Cleanup runs continuously in the background, so an expired mailbox typically disappears within minutes of its time being up.

We cannot restore a deleted mailbox. Not for you, not for anybody, no matter how the request is worded. There is no backup containing it, because a backup containing it would defeat the entire arrangement.