About this service

Frequently asked questions

1. How does the check work?

   First the address is validated against the standard email format, so obvious typos are caught straight away. Then the domain is looked up in our database of disposable mail providers.

   A clean result means the domain is not on the list — the address is most likely a normal mailbox. A temporary result means the domain is a known disposable provider, and mail sent there will probably never be read by a real person. No list is ever complete, so treat the result as a strong hint rather than absolute proof.

2. What is a disposable email address?

   A disposable email address (DEA, sometimes called dark mail or a throwaway address) is an address used for a single contact, a single service, or just a handful of messages.

   The idea is simple: if the address ever leaks, gets sold or starts attracting spam, its owner can simply dispose of it. Nothing else in their mailbox is affected, because nobody else was ever given that address.

3. Why do people use them?

   Handing out one address per service has real advantages. If an address has to be changed, only a single company needs to be informed, instead of every contact the owner has ever written to.

   It also makes leaks easy to trace. Because exactly one company received the address, that company is the obvious source of any spam arriving at it. Addresses that stay clean keep forwarding to the real mailbox, while compromised ones can be filed away, filtered, binned, or deleted outright.

   Finally, a DEA acts as a layer of indirection. When the real mailbox moves — say, from a university account to a private provider — only the DEA service has to be updated, and every address already given out keeps working.

4. Why do site owners block them?

   Forum and wiki administrators tend to dislike throwaway addresses because they hide who a member really is. Banned users, trolls and vandals can register again within seconds using a fresh address, and the same convenience that protects honest users from spam also protects the people causing trouble.

   There is a commercial reason too: a business that expects to reach its customers by email gets little value from a mailbox that stops existing after ten minutes, and the bounces coming back from dead domains quietly damage the sender reputation of the whole service.

5. Is blocking them always the right call?

   Not necessarily. Rejecting every disposable domain is a blunt instrument, and no filter is foolproof. Some legitimate users will be turned away (false positives), while determined abusers will always find a domain that is not on any list yet (false negatives).

   A gentler approach often works better: tell long-lived aliasing services apart from random ten-minute domains, limit what an unverified account can do instead of refusing it, or ask for confirmation only when the account tries something sensitive.

6. What is SpamCop?

   SpamCop is an email spam reporting service. Recipients of unsolicited bulk or commercial mail can report it, and SpamCop traces the message back to the IP address that sent it, then notifies the abuse contact responsible for that address. Those reports are compiled into the SpamCop Blocking List (SCBL), a blocklist used by mail servers worldwide to reject traffic from known spam sources.

7. What is address munging?

   Address munging means disguising an email address so that automated harvesters cannot read it, while a human still can. The classic example turns no-one@example.com into "no-one at example dot com".

   It is worth doing, because any address published in public — on a web page, in a forum, on Usenet or in a chat room — is likely to be picked up sooner or later by harvesting software and added to a spam list. Private correspondence is rarely collected, but a message sent to a publicly archived mailing list is just as exposed as a web page.