Temporary email

What temporary email is for

Temporary email gives you a short-lived receive-only inbox so you can complete a verification — catch a code, click a link — without attaching your permanent address to another service. The inbox exists for as long as the task requires, then expires. No account needed to create one. No ongoing spam because the address will not exist to receive any.

The most common use is simple: someone reached a signup gate and did not want to hand over a real address to a service they might use once. That is a reasonable thing to want. The second common use is QA and development — a working mailbox that receives real verification mail, requires no mail server to operate, and cleans itself up automatically after the test.

Thirtel is specifically receive-only, with a thirty-minute TTL backed by Cloudflare Workers KV. When the timer expires, the storage key expires with it — there is no backup copy, no archive, no way to retrieve a message after the window closes.

How Thirtel temporary email works

1. You open the inbox and get a random address on our mail domain.
2. Inbound mail is accepted via Cloudflare Email Routing into a Worker.
3. Messages are parsed and stored in Workers KV with a fixed TTL — 30 minutes by default — set at write time.
4. Your browser polls for new mail every few seconds. When the TTL ends, the keys expire. There is no traditional long-lived database of your inbox.

v1 is receive-only. Thirtel does not send mail from your temporary address. That scope keeps expectations clear and removes the most common abuse surface — outbound mail from anonymous shared domains cannot build sender reputation, so it fails delivery or lands in spam anyway.

The address is randomly generated, not user-chosen, which reduces guessing and enumeration risk. Mail is shown as plain text by default. If formatting matters, sandboxed HTML rendering is available — scripts are stripped and external images are blocked unless you request them, which blocks most tracking pixels.

When temporary email helps

• One-time verification codes and sign-in links from services you will not keep using
• Free trials, gated downloads, and coupon forms where you want the content but not the list
• Developer and QA flows that need a real working mailbox for a few minutes without standing up a mail stack
• Keeping newsletters and "just checking in" follow-ups away from the inbox you actually read
• Throwaway product evaluations where you want to try before committing a real identity

The pattern that works well: one registration, one verification, done. Temporary email is not a substitute for a durable address in any relationship that continues past that first message.

When not to use it

Do not use disposable mail for banking, investment platforms, government portals, healthcare records, employer or institutional SSO, or anything you must prove ownership of months later. A lapsed inbox cannot confirm your identity, recover a password, or receive a billing alert. The test before you register: if you needed this account back in six months, would you still have this address? If not, use a real one.

Some services also block disposable domains outright — blocklists exist specifically because free trials and promo codes have been harvested at scale using throwaway addresses. A failed delivery on a blocked domain is a signal, not a problem to route around. Read the full don't-list.

Privacy, realistically

Temporary email reduces long-term exposure. It does not make you invisible and does not encrypt mail in transit or at rest.

While an inbox is live, treat the address as semi-public. Anyone who knows or guesses the address can read arriving mail. Random-string addresses are harder to enumerate than common words, but services without rate limiting on inbox reads can still be probed systematically. HTML mail is a specific concern: messages often embed tracking pixels that log your IP and timestamp when an image loads. Thirtel shows plain text by default; sandboxed HTML rendering is available for messages where formatting matters — scripts are stripped, external images are blocked unless you explicitly load them.

Operators have access to messages while they exist. That is structural: any service that shows you mail can read mail. Workers KV TTL means messages disappear when time is up — no archive, no recovery. Details on what is and is not retained are on the Privacy page.

Pair it with the rest of the signup

Most registration forms ask for more than an address. They ask for a password. Sometimes a name, a birth year, a username.

Password reuse is the real risk of throwaway signups. If you register a temp-inbox account with a password you use elsewhere, you have created a real credential against a service you do not trust. When that service is breached — breach frequency is high — that credential gets tested against accounts that matter. Generate a unique password for every disposable registration. Thirtel's password generator runs entirely in the browser; the string is never transmitted.

For QA flows that need realistic form data, Thirtel's test identity tool generates synthetic names, usernames, cities, and birth years client-side. Not for fraud, not for bypassing real identity checks — for filling non-sensitive form fields during development walkthroughs. The fake identity for signups guide covers the full QA use case and where it must not go.

Combining a Thirtel inbox, a generated password, and a synthetic test identity gives you a complete, clean test registration that exercises every verification step without involving real personal data.

FAQ