A mailbox that isn't meant to last.

Postbox started from a small annoyance: half the internet won't let you look at anything — a price list, a single article, a free trial — without an email address first. Most of the time that address becomes a permanent line to a company you interacted with once. Postbox is a way to hand over an address that's real for exactly as long as you need it, and nothing more.

What we built

Every visitor gets a freshly generated address on our domain, good for ten minutes. Mail sent to it appears in the browser in real time. When the ten minutes are up, the address and every message that came with it are deleted — there's no archive, no backup, and no way to recover it afterward, by us or anyone else.

What we didn't build

Postbox doesn't send mail, only receive it. It doesn't ask for your real email, your name, or any payment. There's no account system, because there's nothing to log into — a new address is one page-load away at any time.

Who this is for

People testing a signup flow, reading a single confirmation code, trying a service before deciding whether it deserves a real address, or just declining to hand out one more permanent inbox for a thirty-second interaction.

Who runs it

Postbox is an independently run tool, not affiliated with any of the services whose confirmation emails happen to pass through it. If something's broken or behaving oddly, the fastest fix is usually to generate a new address and try again.