Throwaway email for one-time signups
For the forms that want an email address purely so they can email you later. Give them this one instead, take what you came for, and close the tab.
Your temporary address 60 min
Inbox
- Waiting for the first message…
Want an address that lives forever — without the spam?
A free permanent alias forwards to your real inbox and switches off the second it starts attracting junk. Or read mail from any provider in the Webmail app.
The one-time signup problem
A gate stands between you and a PDF, a trial, a coupon or a forum thread, and the toll is your email address. You pay it, get what you came for, and then spend the next three years unsubscribing from a newsletter you never wanted, from a company that has since sold your address to four others. The transaction was never equal: they got a durable channel to you, you got one file.
A throwaway address makes it equal. You still get the file. They get a string that stops resolving in an hour. There is no unsubscribe to click later because there is no mailbox for the mail to arrive in, and no data-broker record to join against because the address was never connected to anything else you own.
How to use it well
Copy the address, paste it into the form, keep this tab open while you wait. Messages appear in the list within roughly five seconds of arriving; the page only checks while it is actually visible, so a forgotten tab is not polling in the background. Open a message and the links it contains are listed separately below the body, which lets you click the activation link without the email itself ever being allowed to load a tracking pixel.
Use a fresh address per site. It costs one button press and it means a leak from one signup tells nobody anything about another. If a form rejects the domain, switch domains with the dropdown and try again.
When a throwaway is the wrong tool
Anything with money, identity or recovery attached to it. Order confirmations, tickets, invoices, two-factor backup codes and account registrations you may want to log back into all need an address that will still accept mail next month. Sending a password reset to an expired throwaway address is how people permanently lose accounts.
The middle ground is a per-site alias: permanent enough for receipts and resets, disposable enough to switch off the day it starts attracting junk. See also temporary email, disposable email, 10 minute mail, fake email generator and the temp mail home page.
Throwaway email: common questions
What is a throwaway email address?
An address you hand over once and never use again. Functionally it is the same as a temporary or disposable address; the word "throwaway" just describes the intent, which is to give a form what it wants and then discard the whole mailbox.
When should I use a throwaway address instead of my real one?
Whenever the only thing you want from a sender is a single message: a download link, a discount code, a forum activation, a Wi-Fi portal, a one-off trial. If you would be annoyed to hear from them again in six months, that is the signal.
Does using throwaway email stop spam?
It stops that particular sender, and anyone they sell the address to, from reaching you — because the mailbox stops existing. It does nothing about spam already arriving at your real address, which needs filtering or per-site aliases you can revoke.
Can a website tell I used a throwaway address?
Often, yes. Anti-fraud services keep lists of known disposable domains and some signup forms reject them outright. We rotate receiving domains and drop ones that start getting blocked, but any provider that says it is never detected is lying to you.
Is throwaway email safe to use?
Reading mail here is: HTML is sanitized on the server before it is stored, and rendered in a sandboxed iframe that cannot make network requests. The thing to be careful about is what you register with it, since anything sent to a throwaway address is unrecoverable once it expires.