Best Temporary Email Generators and Safer Alternatives

Start with what your phone, browser or email account already gives you. Apple’s Hide My Email, DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection and Firefox Relay each hand a website an address that is not yours and forward the mail to your real inbox, where only you can read it. A throwaway inbox on a public website cannot promise that.

If all you need is to catch one confirmation email from a site you will never go back to, the disposable sites still do the job. Guerrilla Mail, 10 Minute Mail, YOPmail, Mailinator and Maildrop were all running and free when we opened them, and Temp Mail has an app on Google Play. Owlymail, from our old list, no longer loads.

Two limits to know first

Many of these inboxes are public. Mailinator says every possible address at its domain already exists and anyone can open it. YOPmail’s inboxes have no password. Maildrop describes itself as designed for no security. Anyone who guesses the name you picked can read the mail and click the links in it.

Many sites refuse disposable addresses. The services say so themselves. 10 Minute Mail changes its domain every 45 days because site owners block the old ones, and YOPmail puts out a new domain every day for the same reason. Even Firefox Relay lists a site not accepting its masks as one reason mail may not arrive.

So never use a disposable address for a bank, a wallet, your main social accounts, or anything you will need to log in to again. A password reset sent to an inbox that has expired, or that a stranger can open, is no use to you. These tools are for keeping marketing mail out of your inbox. They are not for getting round a ban or pretending to be someone else.

What you may already have

Apple Hide My Email

When an app or website offers Sign in with Apple, you can choose to hide your email. Apple then creates a random address for that one service and forwards its mail to you. You can read and answer those messages without the sender seeing your real address.

With an iCloud+ subscription you can also create addresses whenever you like, in Safari, Mail or Settings, for sites that do not support Sign in with Apple. Apple says you can make as many as you need and switch off or delete any of them. It needs iOS 15, iPadOS 15 or macOS 12 or later, and it also works from iCloud.com.

Gmail plus addresses

Gmail ignores anything you type between a plus sign and the @. Google’s own examples are [email protected] for newsletters and [email protected] for a shop account. The mail arrives in your normal inbox, and you can set a filter to label, archive or delete everything sent to that version of the address.

This sorts mail. It does not hide you, because your real username is still in the address. It is free and needs no setup, which makes it the easiest way to see who passed your address on.

Firefox Relay

Relay gives everyone five email masks for free. Each one forwards to your real address with common trackers stripped out, and you can switch a mask off when it starts attracting spam. The free tier is available in most countries, Mozilla says.

Relay Premium adds unlimited masks, your own Relay subdomain and the ability to reply from a mask. Mozilla lists the countries where Premium is sold. The United States and the United Kingdom are on that list; Nigeria and India are not. The page showed us a waitlist button where the price would be.

DuckDuckGo Email Protection

DuckDuckGo’s service is free. You get a personal @duck.com address, and you can generate as many private ones as you like, each a random string of words. Mail is forwarded to your existing inbox with hidden trackers removed. Private addresses do not expire, and you can deactivate any one of them if it starts getting spam. DuckDuckGo says replies work for most addresses and are sent from the Duck address, not your own.

You sign up inside the DuckDuckGo browser on a phone or computer, or through its extension for Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave or Opera.

Temporary email generators at a glance

The disposable sites one by one

Guerrilla Mail. No registration. The site gives you a random address the moment you open it, or you can choose your own. Incoming mail is kept for one hour and then deleted, while the address itself keeps working. Because there are no accounts, anyone who knows your inbox ID can open the inbox. Guerrilla Mail’s answer is Scramble Address, which gives out a second address that cannot be used to open the inbox. Use it.

10 Minute Mail. The address expires ten minutes after you open the page. A button adds ten more minutes, up to 100 in total. Mailboxes are random, never reused, and the site says nobody else can read yours. By its own account that makes it the most private of the throwaway sites here. It is also the least useful if the email you are waiting for arrives late.

YOPmail. You type any name and that inbox exists, with no registration and no password. Messages stay for eight days. YOPmail does not allow sending to outside addresses, to prevent abuse, but you can reply to a message and write to other YOPmail inboxes. Since anyone can type the same name, pick one that is hard to guess or use the site’s random generator.

Mailinator. It was built for developers and testers, and the paid plans, from $79 a month, are for them. The free public side still works: make up any address at mailinator.com and read it on the site. It is receive-only, messages are deleted after several hours, and every inbox is open to everyone. Treat anything sent there as public.

Maildrop. Make up an address at maildrop.cc and read it on the site, with no sign-up. It is strict about what it accepts: attachments are thrown away, an inbox holds ten messages at most, and an inbox that gets nothing for 24 hours is cleared. Maildrop says plainly that it offers little to no privacy.

Temp Mail. Its website put a security check in front of us, so this comes from the app’s Google Play listing. The app creates an address without registration, receives mail and attachments, and sends a notification when something arrives. It is free with adverts. A Premium subscription adds custom names, several mailboxes, longer storage and no ads, at a price that depends on your country.

Which one to use

• For accounts you might come back to (a shop, a newsletter, a forum): a forwarding address. DuckDuckGo Email Protection is the one we would pick, because it is free, unlimited and the addresses do not expire. On an iPhone, Hide My Email is already there.
• To find out who shares your address: a Gmail plus address.
• For one confirmation email and nothing more: 10 Minute Mail, or Guerrilla Mail with a scrambled address.
• Only for things you would not mind a stranger reading: Mailinator, Maildrop and YOPmail.

Quick answers

Is there a fake email generator with an inbox?

Yes. Every site in the table gives you a working inbox as well as an address. Guerrilla Mail and 10 Minute Mail create a random one as soon as the page opens.

Can I get a temporary Gmail address?

Gmail does not make temporary addresses. What it offers is the plus trick: add a plus sign and a word before the @, and the mail still reaches your inbox, where a filter can deal with it.

Can I use a temporary email for a verification code?

Only if the site accepts the address, and many do not. On a public inbox, anyone who opens it can see the code too, so do not do it for an account that matters.

Can a temporary email address send email?

Mostly no. Mailinator is receive-only, and YOPmail allows replies and mail to other YOPmail inboxes. Guerrilla Mail has a Compose tab.

How long does a temporary email address last?

It depends on the site: ten minutes on 10 Minute Mail, an hour per message on Guerrilla Mail, several hours on Mailinator and eight days on YOPmail.