Emails that vanish.
No signup. No tracking. No spam. Just click.
What is a disposable email address?
A disposable email address is a real, working inbox that exists for a short time and then deletes itself. You use it wherever an address is required but a lasting relationship is not: a one-off download, a forum registration, a trial account, a Wi-Fi portal. Messages arrive normally — confirmation links, verification codes, receipts — and when the address expires, everything it received is destroyed along with it.
The point is not anonymity. It is separation. Your real inbox stays reserved for the people and services you actually chose, while everything speculative goes somewhere that costs you nothing to abandon. If the address later surfaces in a marketing list or a breach dump, there is nothing left behind to expose. For a longer treatment, see what a temporary email is and why you need one.
How Ghostmails works
Three steps, no account, no password.
- Generate. One click creates an address on ghostmails.cc. There is no form to fill, nothing to confirm, and no personal detail to hand over.
- Receive. Mail sent to that address appears in the inbox above within seconds. Attachments are supported and downloadable, and the inbox refreshes on its own — you do not need to reload the page.
- Forget. The address expires one hour after creation. You can extend it in one-hour steps, up to twenty-four hours from the moment it was created. After that it is deleted, and so is everything it received.
The mechanics are covered in more detail on how it works.
Your inbox is not public
This is where Ghostmails differs from most disposable email services. On many of them, any inbox can be opened by anyone who types the address — the address is the credential, so a guessable name means a readable inbox.
Ghostmails binds each address to a signed session cookie held only by your browser. The server rejects any request for an inbox that does not carry the matching session, so knowing the address is not enough to read what it received. It is a small difference with a large consequence when the message contains a password reset link. We go through the threat model in are temporary emails safe, and compare the main services in Ghostmails vs Temp-Mail vs GuerrillaMail.
When a temporary inbox makes sense
One-off downloads and gated content
A whitepaper, a template, a coupon code — anything that asks for an address in exchange for a single file. You need the email once; the sender will keep it for years.
Free trials and throwaway accounts
Trying a tool you may abandon in ten minutes. A disposable address lets you evaluate it without adding a permanent entry to someone else's CRM.
Forums, wikis and one-time support tickets
Registration walls on sites you will visit twice. The confirmation link arrives, you click it, and the address stops mattering.
Public Wi-Fi and captive portals
Airport and hotel networks that trade internet access for an address. Those lists get resold more often than anyone admits.
Testing your own signup flow
Developers checking that verification emails render and deliver correctly, without polluting a real mailbox or burning aliases.
Classifieds and marketplaces
Selling a couch should not mean handing your primary address to everyone who scrolls past the listing.
More scenarios, with the reasoning behind each, in five situations that call for a disposable address. If your goal is to cut the spam you already receive, protecting your email from spam is the better starting point.
What Ghostmails does not do
No account, no password, no phone number, no email address of your own. Nothing to sign up for means nothing to leak. There is no analytics script following you between pages, no profile being assembled, and no third party receiving your messages.
Your messages are never sold, shared, mined, or read by a human. They live in the database only until the address expires, and then they are gone. The full detail — what is stored, for how long, and who the processors are — is set out in the privacy policy, in plain language rather than boilerplate.
Limits worth knowing before you rely on it
A disposable inbox is the wrong tool for anything you will need to get back into later. Do not use Ghostmails for banking, government services, medical portals, or any account you intend to keep: once the address is gone, password recovery is gone with it, and no amount of asking will bring it back.
- Addresses last one hour by default, and twenty-four hours at the absolute maximum.
- Each address accepts up to 50 messages and 50 MB of attachments; beyond that, new mail is refused.
- Receive-only. You cannot send, reply, or forward from a Ghostmails address.
- Up to five addresses per minute from the same connection, to keep the service usable for everyone.
- Expired data is deleted permanently, on an hourly schedule, with no archive and no recovery.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Ghostmails free?
- Yes, entirely. There is no account, no trial, and no payment step. The site is supported by advertising rather than by selling or brokering user data.
- Can I send email from a Ghostmails address?
- No. Ghostmails is receive-only. You can read messages and download attachments, but you cannot reply or compose. This is deliberate: outbound sending is what turns a disposable service into a spam relay.
- Can I keep an address for more than 24 hours?
- Not today. Twenty-four hours from creation is a hard ceiling. Longer-lived addresses are planned as a paid option, which is also what will let the service run without advertising.
- Do I have to accept cookies to use it?
- No. Generating an address and reading your inbox work regardless of what you choose in the cookie banner. The only cookie the service itself needs is the session cookie that protects your inbox.
- What happens to my messages when the address expires?
- They are deleted. A cleanup job runs every hour and removes expired addresses, every message they hold, and every stored attachment. Nothing is archived and nothing is recoverable — including by us.
Other questions are answered on the FAQ page, and anything not covered there can go to contact.