What Are Disposable Emails?
A complete guide for developers, marketers, and product teams on temporary email addresses — what they are, why people use them, and how they hurt your business.
What Are Disposable Email Addresses?
Disposable emails are temporary, throwaway email addresses that expire after minutes or hours. Services like Mailinator, 10MinuteMail, and GuerrillaMail let anyone create instant inboxes with zero verification.
Temporary inboxes that self-destruct
Disposable email addresses — also called temp mail, throwaway email, or fake email — are email addresses designed for one-time use. They require no registration and disappear automatically.
- Created instantly without any signup process
- Expire after 10 minutes to 24 hours
- Cannot receive replies after expiration
- Used to bypass email verification systems
- 277,000+ known disposable email domains exist
Why Do People Use Disposable Emails?
Understanding user motivation helps you decide when to block temporary emails and when to allow them. Not all disposable email usage is malicious — but most of it hurts your business.
Legitimate uses (rare)
- Protecting privacy from potential spam
- Testing a service before committing
- One-time downloads or PDFs
Abusive uses (common)
- Creating multiple free trial accounts
- Farming referral bonuses and promo codes
- Bypassing bans and account restrictions
- Submitting fake reviews or spam comments
- Exploiting one-per-user offers
- Avoiding accountability for abuse
The Abuse Pattern
One user creates 50 accounts with 50 different disposable emails to exploit your free tier, referral program, or promotional offers — costing you money and polluting your analytics.
Risks of Disposable Emails for Your Business
Temporary emails don't just create fake accounts — they poison your metrics, waste your marketing spend, and erode trust in your user base. Here's what's at stake.
Polluted Analytics
Fake signups skew your conversion rates, cohort analysis, and growth metrics. You can't make good decisions with bad data.
Wasted Marketing Spend
Emails to disposable addresses bounce or go unread. Your CAC rises while engagement rates plummet.
Promo & Referral Fraud
Users create infinite accounts to stack coupons, farm referral bonuses, and exploit one-time offers.
Email Deliverability
High bounce rates from dead temp addresses hurt your sender reputation and land you in spam folders.
Community Trust
Anonymous users with throwaway emails feel less accountable, leading to more abuse, trolling, and spam.
Support Overhead
You waste time on fake accounts, fraudulent refund requests, and users you can never reach again.
Why Regex & MX Lookup Don't Work
DIY solutions like regex patterns and MX record checks seem appealing — but they fail against modern disposable email services. Here's why a purpose-built API is the only reliable solution.
const blocked = [
'mailinator.com',
'tempmail.com',
// ... 50 more?
];
// Problem: 277,000+ domains exist
// New ones appear daily
// You'll never catch them all
const mx = await dns.resolveMx(domain);
// Problem: Temp mail services
// have valid MX records!
// They're real mail servers
// — just temporary ones
const res = await fetch(
`https://api.tempmailchecker.com/check?email=${email}`
);
const { temp } = await res.json();
if (temp) blockSignup();
// ✓ 277,000+ domains checked
// ✓ Updated daily
// ✓ <5ms response time
Known Disposable Email Domains (250+ Examples)
Below is a sample of the 277,000+ temporary email domains in our database. These throwaway email providers are updated daily as new disposable mail services emerge.
Showing 250 of 277,000+ known disposable email domains. Get API access to check against the full database.
Frequently Searched Questions About Disposable Emails
Answers to the most common questions developers, marketers, and security teams ask about temporary email addresses and how to handle them.
Disposable email services create unique challenges for online businesses. From legal considerations to technical detection methods, understanding how temp mail works is essential for building secure signup flows. Below we answer the questions developers and product teams ask most frequently.
Are temporary emails illegal?
No, using disposable email addresses is not illegal. They're a legitimate privacy tool. However, using them to commit fraud, bypass security measures, or violate terms of service may be illegal depending on the jurisdiction. Businesses have every right to reject signups from disposable email providers to protect their platforms from abuse.
Can you track who used a disposable email?
Generally, no. Disposable email services don't require registration or identity verification. Users can access throwaway inboxes anonymously. However, you can track behavior patterns — IP addresses, device fingerprints, and usage timing — to identify repeat abuse even if the email address changes each time.
Want to automatically block every temp email on this list?
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How long do disposable email addresses last?
It varies by provider. 10MinuteMail expires in 10 minutes (extendable). Mailinator inboxes are public and persist until overwritten. GuerrillaMail lasts about an hour. TempMail addresses typically last 24 hours. Some services like YOPmail keep inboxes accessible indefinitely but don't guarantee delivery.
Can disposable emails receive verification codes?
Yes, most disposable email services can receive verification codes, OTPs, and confirmation links. That's precisely why they're a threat to your signup flow. Users create a throwaway inbox, receive your verification email, click the link, and abandon the email forever — leaving you with an uncontactable account.
Do disposable emails bypass double opt-in?
Yes. Double opt-in only verifies that someone can access the inbox at signup time. Since disposable emails receive emails temporarily, users can confirm the double opt-in and then let the address expire. You end up with a "verified" email that bounces within hours — hurting your deliverability.
Are disposable email addresses anonymous?
Mostly yes. Services like Mailinator and GuerrillaMail don't require registration. However, they're not completely anonymous — your IP address may be logged, and some services display inboxes publicly. For true anonymity, users combine temp mail with VPNs or Tor, making tracking nearly impossible.
Deep Dive: How Disposable Emails Affect SaaS, Newsletters & E-commerce
Understanding the real-world impact of temporary email addresses on different business models — and why blocking them at the source is the only scalable solution.
💻 The SaaS Problem: Free Trial Abuse at Scale
For SaaS companies offering free trials, disposable emails represent a direct threat to revenue. A single user can create dozens of trial accounts using different throwaway addresses, effectively accessing your paid features indefinitely without ever converting. This isn't just theoretical — it's happening at scale. Competitors run bots that spin up trial accounts to study your product. Freeloaders share "lifetime free trial" guides on Reddit and Hacker News.
By blocking disposable emails at registration, you filter out noise and focus resources on users who represent real conversion potential.
The damage compounds when you consider the operational costs. Each fake account consumes server resources, pollutes your analytics, and may even trigger feature limits that affect legitimate users. Customer success teams waste time reaching out to accounts that will never respond.
📧 The Newsletter Problem: Phantom Subscribers Killing Deliverability
Email marketers face a different but equally destructive pattern. Users sign up for your lead magnet or newsletter using a disposable address, download the content, and vanish. Your list grows — but so does your bounce rate. Within weeks, those temporary addresses stop accepting mail. Email service providers like Gmail and Outlook track sender reputation closely.
Filtering out temp mail at the point of capture protects your deliverability and ensures your list represents genuinely interested subscribers.
The financial impact is substantial. You're paying your ESP based on list size, but a chunk of those "subscribers" are worthless. You're sending campaigns to addresses that will never open, dragging down your open rates and click-through rates.
🛒 The E-commerce Problem: Coupon Abuse and Referral Fraud
Online retailers lose billions annually to promotional abuse, and disposable emails are the primary enabler. First-order discount? A fraudster creates 50 accounts and places 50 "first" orders. Referral bonus program? The same person refers themselves repeatedly, cashing out rewards meant to attract new customers.
Implementing disposable email detection at checkout and registration creates a barrier that dramatically reduces promo fraud while maintaining a seamless experience for legitimate buyers.
The ripple effects extend beyond direct losses. Inventory allocated to fraudulent orders becomes unavailable to real customers. Marketing teams celebrate growth metrics that evaporate on closer inspection.
🛡️ Why Prevention Beats Detection
Some platforms attempt to identify abuse after the fact — flagging suspicious accounts based on behavior patterns, limiting features for new users, or manually reviewing signups. These approaches have merit but fail to address the core problem. By the time you detect abuse, the damage is done. The fake review is posted. The referral bonus is paid.
The superior approach is blocking disposable emails at the moment of registration. A simple API call during signup — taking less than 5 milliseconds — tells you whether the email domain is known for throwaway addresses.
Users with legitimate emails proceed normally. Users with temp mail see a polite message asking for a permanent address. No friction for real users. No opportunities for abusers. Clean data from day one.
Test a Disposable Email — Live
Try it yourself. Enter any email address below to instantly check if it's from a disposable email provider. No signup required.