Terms of use

1. What the service is

Inboxspam gives you a disposable, receive-only email address. There’s no account and no password: the inbox belongs to the browser that made it.

A free inbox lives for one hour. It holds up to 200 messages — beyond that, the oldest are dropped as new mail arrives — and stops accepting mail if more than 100 messages reach it in a single hour. Those limits keep one address from consuming the service for everyone else, and they can change.

2. Who may use it

You must be at least 13, or 16 in the UK and the EEA. Don’t use Inboxspam where doing so would be against the law where you are. If you’re using it for an organisation, you’re confirming you can agree to these terms on its behalf.

3. Acceptable use

You may not use Inboxspam, or any address it gives you, to:

• break the law, or help anyone else to;
• commit or assist fraud, phishing or impersonation, including signing up to anything in someone else’s name;
• evade a ban, suspension or block from another service;
• receive material that is illegal to possess or distribute, including child sexual abuse material;
• harass, threaten or stalk anyone;
• register accounts in bulk, or create inboxes with a script — the service is built for people, one inbox at a time;
• try to open an inbox that isn’t yours, or to guess, enumerate or brute-force addresses;
• attack, overload, probe or reverse-engineer the service, or work around its rate limits;
• resell access to it, or run a service of your own on top of it.

Plenty of sites refuse disposable addresses, and that’s their call to make. Whether you use one to get past that is between you and them — but using it to get around a ban they’ve already given you isn’t allowed here either.

4. What you can and can’t expect

• No guarantee of delivery. Mail can be refused, delayed or lost. Some senders block disposable domains, and any of our domains may be blocked by a third party without warning.
• No guarantee of retention. An inbox can be removed before its hour is up — because of an abuse report, a fault, or maintenance.
• No guarantee of availability. It’s a free service, and free services go down.
• Deletion is permanent. Once an inbox expires or you delete it, nothing can bring it back: not us, not you, not a request. That’s a design decision, not a limitation to be worked around.
• Addresses are recycled after a 30-day hold. An address you once used may later belong to somebody else, and anything sent to it then is theirs.

Which leads to the one rule worth repeating: don’t use an Inboxspam address for anything you’d mind losing. Not account recovery for something that matters, not banking, not medical or legal correspondence, and not two-factor codes for an account you need to keep.

5. Your mail is yours

We claim no ownership of anything sent to your inbox. We store it and display it so you can read it, and then we delete it. What we hold and for how long is set out in the privacy policy.

6. Our site is ours

The Inboxspam name, the design, the words on these pages and the code behind them belong to us. Using the service doesn’t license any of it.

7. Suspension and termination

We can delete any inbox, block any address, or refuse service at any time, with or without notice — particularly on a credible report of abuse. Since a free inbox lasts an hour, this is usually a formality rather than a punishment.

8. Paid plans

Premium isn’t available yet and we take no payments today. When it launches, terms covering billing, renewal, cancellation and refunds will be added to this page — and you’ll see them before you’re asked to pay anything.

9. No warranty

Inboxspam is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We don’t warrant that it will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or free of error.

10. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, nor for lost profits, lost data, or mail that didn’t arrive, arrived late, or was deleted — whether or not we’d been told such a loss was possible.

Where liability can’t be excluded, it is limited to the greater of what you paid us in the preceding twelve months (for a free inbox, nothing) or US$50.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

11. Indemnity

If the way you use Inboxspam leads to a claim against us — because you broke these terms, or somebody else’s rights — you agree to cover the cost of dealing with it.

12. Changes

We may change these terms. When we do, the date at the top changes with them, and continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new version.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms: the contact form. To report abuse: the abuse form.

Inboxspam is run by one person in the United States, not by a company. “We” throughout these terms means that person.

See also the privacy policy.