Questions About This Generator

How do I get an address here?

You already have one. An address is generated the moment the front page loads, it appears at the top of the screen, and it starts taking delivery immediately. There is no button to press first, no account to open and no confirmation step to sit through.

Copy it, paste it wherever you need it, and leave the tab open. Arriving mail pushes itself onto the page over a connection that is already established, so there is nothing to refresh and no interval to wait out. If you want the mechanism rather than the instructions, the assembly of the string is described step by step.

Can I choose the name myself?

Yes. Type whatever you want into the name field and it becomes the left half of the address, subject to two limits. A handful of names are reserved, abuse and postmaster among them, because mail about the domain itself has to reach a human here rather than a visitor.

Worth knowing before you do it: a name you invented is far easier for a stranger to arrive at than the one the generator produced, and a guest inbox opens for anyone who types the right address. The trade between a name you can remember and a name nobody will land on is laid out in full here.

How long does this address last?

Twenty four hours, counted from the last time you used it rather than from the moment it was made. Open the tab again on day two and the clock starts over, so an address you keep visiting keeps living.

With a free account the same address runs for seven days from your last sign in, and any individual message inside that window is held for up to thirty days. Neither figure is negotiable and there is no paid tier that extends it.

What happens when I ask for a new address?

The old one is deleted at that instant, along with every message in it. There is no waiting period, no bin to fish anything out of and no way to change your mind, so read what you need before you press for a replacement.

This catches people mid-signup more than anything else. If a code has not turned up yet, wait with the tab open rather than requesting a fresh address, because the request destroys the exact inbox the code is being delivered to.

Can somebody else end up with the same address?

Yes, and the service does not treat that as a fault. Nobody owns an address here: once yours is deleted the string goes back into circulation, and the generator may hand it to somebody else weeks later. What that person gets is an empty inbox, since your messages went when the mailbox did.

What they also get is anything sent to that address from then on, which is the part that matters if you left it attached to an account somewhere. The risk is much larger for a short name you typed yourself than for a random one, and the reuse question has a guide of its own.

Can I get an address back after it is gone?

No. Expiry removes the mailbox record and its contents together, and there is no archive, no snapshot and no backup file holding a second copy. A minute afterwards there is nothing left for anyone to restore, including us.

Typing the same string into the field again gives you a fresh empty inbox on that address, not the old one. Mail that arrived while the address did not exist was refused at delivery and is not waiting anywhere.

Can I send mail from this address?

No. Every address on this service takes delivery and stops there, and that is permanent rather than unfinished. There is no reply button hidden behind an account and no plan to add one.

The reason is arithmetic. Let anonymous visitors send and the domains become a spam source within days, after which every mail provider refuses them, and the receiving half stops working along with the sending half. Blocking one direction is what keeps the other direction usable.

Is there an API?

No, and none is planned. Automated handout burns through the pool of working domains faster than anything else, and the cost of that falls on everyone generating addresses by hand.

The reasoning, along with the tools that suit automated testing better than this one does, is set out in its own guide.

A form refused my address. Why?

Because that site compared the part after the at sign against a list of known disposable domains and found a match. Your inbox is working normally and mail still reaches it; one particular form declined to take it.

Ask for a new address and you will usually get a different domain, which settles it most of the time. Writing to the list maintainers is not worth the effort, because the entry they made is factually correct.

Can I use this for a verification code?

Yes, and that is the single most common use of the service. Codes and links arrive within seconds, appear on the page by themselves, and are perfectly safe to click from here.

The line to watch is not the code, it is what the code opens. A one-time login to read an article or download a file is exactly right. An account you will still want next month is not, because the address that account resets to will have ceased to exist by then.

Who else can read this inbox?

Without an account, anybody who types the same address into this site. A guest inbox carries no password, so the address is the entire lock, and short memorable strings do get guessed by people trying likely words.

For a discount code that hardly matters. For anything you would mind a stranger reading, sign in and use an account inbox, which is bound to your account and opens for nobody else.

What does a free account add?

Four things, and it costs nothing. Ten inboxes running side by side instead of one, domains that are never printed on any public page, working attachments, and inboxes that belong to you rather than to whoever knows the address.

The unpublished domains are the part that changes daily experience most. A domain that never appears on a page a scraper can read stays acceptable to signup forms far longer, which is the whole reason those domains sit behind a sign in. Running several inboxes at once also makes it practical to give every form its own address.

Can I receive attachments?

With an account, yes. Files arrive with the message, are kept apart from it, and are erased at the same moment it is, so nothing attached ever outlives the mail it travelled with. Executable file types are refused at delivery and never written to disk at all.

Without an account you see the text of the message and no files.

How is this free?

Advertising pays for it, and that is the whole arrangement. There is no paid tier, no trial that runs out and nothing switched off on purpose so that a better version can be sold to you.

Ads occupy space that is reserved before they load, so the page does not jump under your finger, and none of them is permitted to look like a control on this site. What that buys is a service where a confirmation link you click is always the sender's and never ours.