The Best Temporary Email Services for 2024 (2024)

The best way to protect your personal information is to never post it on the internet. But how do you avoid revealing your personal email address? You can’t send and receive mail without exposing it, and so junk mail is unavoidable, right? Wrong! Using a temporary email service, you can communicate with online merchants, blind dates, even spies, all while keeping your real email address secret.

We’re not talking about the totally ephemeral email addresses provided by services such as temp-mail.org, guerrillamail.com, or emailondeck.com. With these services, anybody can get a truly throwaway email address, with no connection to an actual email address. You get your response by keeping the page open, and your temporary address vanishes in anywhere from a couple of days to 10 minutes. The best temporary email services, discussed here, let you continue to use your regular email address without exposing it to junk mail and snoops.

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Buying Guide: The Best Temporary Email Services for 2024

Do Temporary Email Addresses Have Other Names?

Depending on which service you use, you’ll find many different names for the email addresses that serve to hide your actual email. One official-sounding term is disposable email address (DEA), thus named because you can discard it if you begin to get spam or any other problems. Alias is another common term—and a handy one.

Spies and crooks in stories use burner phones to avoid tracing; burner email is the equivalent term. Other services use terms like email forwarder, masked email, and even FlyBy email. Whatever you call it, the effect is the same. You smoothly communicate via email without ever exposing your actual address.

How Does a Temporary Email Service Work?

Let’s say you want to buy a Mandalorian helmet online. The etailer requires your email address to complete the transaction, but instead of revealing it, you fill in a disposable alias. For some services you’ll launch an app to get that alias; others may put an icon right in the email data-entry field. The merchant sends any correspondence to the temporary inbox, but thanks to the service, the incoming email winds up in your regular inbox.When you reply, it seems to come from the temporary email address. You also use a different alias for each merchant or other correspondent.

Masking your true email address helps protect your privacy, but that’s not the only benefit: If one of your temporary inboxes starts to receive spam, you can just cut off forwarding of incoming email from that alias or delete it entirely. Some services offer finer-grained control. For example, Bulc Club lets you block a sender or sending domain from reaching a specific alias. ManyMe does the reverse, letting you lock an alias to a specific sender while blocking all others. With Cloaked, you can associate an identity with one or more email contacts and reject others or set cloaked phone numbers so a first-time caller doesn't ring through.

What Are the Varieties of Disposable Email Addresses?

In a very real sense, the exact name of a temporary email doesn’t matter. It could be jg6tl73bwvhh, or Midwest_bepinch, or 69c61d15-7a7d-4145-aeb1-1e6a3cca2776. You don’t have to remember it: A disposable email service takes care of that. All the services described here include the ability to generate random names like these.

When it comes to managing your email aliases, though, you may be happier if the names contain a hint of their provenance. Most of these services also permit custom names of one kind or another. The layout varies, but it always involves a component specific to your account plus a descriptive section like PlumberKate or CoffeeShop.

Sometimes, you want to give a newly met acquaintance or business associate an email alias, but connecting to your temporary email service would be awkward. With Bulc Club, ManyMe, and SimpleLogin, you can simply make up a temporary address on the fly. As long as you follow the correct format, that alias will get created as soon as it’s used. Such an alias might look like myaccount[emailprotected] or CoffeeShop@myaccount.bulc.club.

Multi-Factor Authentication for Enhanced Security

A temporary email service has access to all your email messages, even if it does nothing more than forward them. If a malefactor cracked such a service, it would be just as bad as if your actual email account got hacked. Naturally, these services password-protect your account and data, but some take security to the next level.

With multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled someone who hacks, steals, or shoulder-surfs your password still can’t get into the account. Full access requires another factor, such as your fingerprint or a code sent to an authenticator app on your mobile phone. Burner Mail, IronVest, SimpleLogin, and StartMail all offer multi-factor authentication using Google Authenticator or one of the many work-alikes. SimpleLogin goes beyond the rest, with support for authentication via YubiKey or another hardware security key. MFA in Clocked isn't quite as fancy; you get your code via text or SMS.

What Other Bonuses Do You Get With Disposable Email?

Taking good care of your aliases is all that a temporary email address service truly has to do, especially if it’s doing the job for free. However, some of these services offer a few to a slew of bonus features.

With IronVest, masking email addresses is just the start. It then masks credit cards and even your phone number. It also includes a complete (if simple) password manager, an active Do Not Track system for your browsers, and more. Cloaked also integrates password management. As a bonus, Cloaked users get million-dollar insurance against identity theft (though identity monitoring isn't included).

StartMail provides encryption for messages to your trusted correspondents alongside temporary email addresses for those who aren’t trusted. Bulc Club offers the option to create totally ephemeral one-time-use email addresses. Finally, BurnerMail, IronVest, ManyMe, and StartMail let you view and manage your email online.

How Much Does Hiding Your Email Cost?

Bulc Club and ManyMe have a very simple pricing proposition—they’re totally free. IronVest and SimpleLogin offer a free tier of service but with limitations. A free IronVest account manages your passwords, masks your email addresses, and blocks web trackers, but that’s all. With SimpleLogin, free accounts are limited to 15 aliases, and advanced features aren’t available.

A full subscription for SimpleLogin runs $30 per year, while Burner Mail undercuts that price by one cent. The feature-laden IronVest costs $39 per year. And to get the combined email encryption and address masking of StartMail, you’ll pay $59.95 per year.

That leaves Cloaked alone at the top, price-wise. Its annual fee of $180 is more than four times what you pay for IronVest. You'll have to decide if its seamless integration of cloaked email, cloaked phones, and password management is worth the fee.

Other Guerrilla Mail Techniques

Private-Mail, Skiff, and Tutanota focus on encrypting your email to keep it safe from prying eyes. All three also include some kind of temporary mail system, but all are seriously limited. At the top pricing tier for each, these products limit you to 20, 10, and 5 aliases, respectively. In addition, Skiff and Tutanota restrict your ability to delete aliases once created. These products aren’t suitable if you want the full power of a temporary email service.

If you dig deeply into Gmail's settings, you'll find references to two types of email aliases. One involves processing another email address that you own along with your regular Gmail. The other refers to creating "aliases" for sorting purposes by appending text after a plus sign, something like [emailprotected]. The former is awkward; the latter doesn't hide your actual email. Outlook.com does let you create true aliases, but it's nowhere near as convenient as these dedicated services.