- Address generation A cryptographically random local part is paired with an approved receiving domain and stored with an expiry timestamp and a hashed access token.
- Session binding Your browser holds a secure, HTTP-only cookie containing the mailbox reference and its secret token. Only the token grants access; the address alone is not enough.
- Receiving Our domain's MX records point at a mail server with a catch-all mailbox, so every address on the domain is deliverable without being created in advance.
- Ingestion A scheduled collector parses each message — MIME structure, encodings, text and HTML alternatives, attachments — sanitises the HTML, and stores it against the matching active inbox. Mail for unknown or expired addresses is discarded.
- Display and expiry Your browser polls for new messages every few seconds. When the countdown ends, the address stops matching and its content is deleted by the cleanup job.
Handling untrusted mail
Email HTML is written by strangers, so it is treated as hostile input: scripts, frames, objects, event handlers and dangerous URL schemes are stripped before storage, remote images are replaced with placeholders so tracking pixels cannot fire, and the surviving markup is rendered inside a fully sandboxed frame. Attachments are stored outside the web-servable directory and always served as forced downloads with a neutral content type.
Go deeper
- The long-form technical explanation
- What this protects and what it does not
- What is stored, and for how long
Questions
Do I need to press anything to get an address?
No. The address is allocated while the page loads.
How quickly does mail appear?
Usually within a few seconds of the sending server delivering it. The inbox polls continuously.
What happens at expiry?
The address stops receiving, stored messages and attachments are deleted, and the access token is invalidated.