Disclaimer

A generated address is a tool with one job and a short life. This page is about the places where people reach for it anyway, and what it costs when the tool turns out to be wrong for the job.

The address will stop existing. Plan around that.

Everything below follows from one property: the address you just generated has an expiry written into it from the first second, and nothing you do keeps it alive indefinitely.

So before pasting it into a form, look at what the form is protecting. If the account behind it holds money, files, a domain name, a job, a delivery or a government record, the address is wrong for it, and no amount of care changes that.

The failure mode is not dramatic and it arrives months later. A password needs resetting, the reset link goes to the address on file, that address stopped existing in a cleanup job weeks ago, and support cannot verify that the account was ever yours. The account is not locked. It is orphaned, and we cannot restore the mailbox, because deletion here removes the row rather than disabling it.

The address may be refused, and that is normal

Detection of disposable domains is an industry with its own vendors and lists, and those lists are updated continuously. A domain that gets popular gets listed. When a form tells you the address is not accepted, the check worked as designed.

Generate again on a different domain, or sign in, which unlocks domains that never appear on the front page and therefore survive detection longer. What will not help is waiting or writing to us: another company's blocklist is not something this service can edit.

The message may never come, and you will not see why

The quieter half of the same problem. A sender who rejects disposable domains usually declines silently: no bounce on their side, nothing at all on ours, and a verification code that never existed rather than one that got lost.

From where you sit that is indistinguishable from a slow service, which is why people refresh for ten minutes. Nothing here can promise that a given site will send to a given address. Two minutes without mail is the point at which a new address is a faster answer than patience.

A generated address is not a secret

Guest mailboxes carry no password. Whoever knows the address can read what is inside it, by design, because there is no account and therefore no identity to check.

The random names this generator produces are hard to guess, which is a real protection but a statistical one, not a lock. Names you type in yourself are weaker: short, memorable words are exactly what other people try. Treat anything arriving at a guest address as visible to strangers, and put what you would mind being read behind an account, where the mailbox belongs to you alone.

Even then, this is a free service paid for by advertising, not a confidential channel, and it has never been described as one anywhere on this site.

What arrives is not checked by us

Messages shown here were written by whoever sent them. We do not read them, review them, endorse them, or vouch for a link, an offer or an attachment inside one.

Scripts and remote content are stripped before display, which removes the ordinary tracking and the ordinary attacks. It does not make a hostile file safe or a fraudulent link honest. Mail landing at an address you generated ten seconds ago came from a stranger, and no filtering changes what that implies.

About the rest of this site

The guides describe what happens on the other side of a signup form: how validation works, where an address travels inside a company, what a breach does with it. That is other people's software and other people's policy, and it changes without notice.

Descriptions accurate on the day of writing go stale on their own. Check the current behaviour before relying on any of it, and use the contact page to tell us what has drifted.

None of it is advice about your particular situation and none of it is legal advice. Where the consequences are real, ask somebody qualified where you live rather than a free mail service.

What to do instead, in the cases above

None of this argues against generated addresses. It argues for using them where the mail stops mattering quickly, which is most of the mail a person receives.

For a signup wall, a download gate, a trial, a forum you will visit twice, a discount code: generate, paste, read the message, move on. For anything with a balance, a renewal, a name on a document or a key to something else: use a real mailbox, and if you would rather not hand out your main address, use an alias from your own provider, which expires when you decide rather than when a cleanup job runs.

The one rule that covers both cases is to copy what you need out of the mailbox before you leave the page. A confirmation number, an order reference, a licence key. This service is a delivery point, not storage, and it is built to forget on a timer.

The service itself

Free, offered without warranty of any kind, and liable to interruption, change or shutdown without notice, taking the contents of every mailbox with it. The terms of use set out the rest.