This notice describes what the application processes when you use a TempMails inbox, why each item is needed, how long it is kept, and which third parties are involved. TempMails is operated by Samir Giri in India; the company page states that identity in full, and the data controller for anything described here is that operator. It describes how the service actually behaves. It does not promise anonymity, and it does not promise instant erasure from infrastructure backups — no service that relies on hosting and mail providers can honestly promise that, and the sections below say where the limits are.
Information processed
TempMails stores the following while an inbox exists:
- Your temporary address, and the messages received at it.
- Outbound message contents and delivery records, when sending is enabled.
- Permitted attachments.
- Creation and expiry times.
- Hashed access credentials.
Two further items support abuse prevention: a pseudonymous device cookie and a keyed IP hash. The keyed hash is a one-way transformation, not the raw address, and it exists to rate-limit address generation and detect patterns that indicate bulk abuse. These identifiers are not used for advertising.
A private browser cookie provides access to your inbox. It is what keeps you attached to the inbox you created without requiring an account.
Why each item is needed
The message contents exist because delivering mail to you is the service. The timestamps exist so the countdown can be enforced. The access credentials exist so that only your browser can read your inbox. The device cookie and IP hash exist because without some limit on address generation the service would be used for bulk account creation, which would get the receiving domain blocked and end the service for everyone.
There is no profile built from your mail. Message contents are not used for profiling, advertising, or analytics, and they are not sold.
Retention
Message contents are processed solely to deliver the inbox service. When an inbox expires it becomes inaccessible immediately, and a scheduled cleanup job removes the stored messages, attachments, and access tokens. Operational and audit records follow the administrator's retention setting, which may be longer than an inbox's life — this is why the notice cannot promise deletion at the same moment your inbox expires.
One-way address tombstones remain after expiry. A tombstone records that an address existed so it cannot be reissued and quietly reused by someone else; it does not contain message content.
Infrastructure providers
The service runs on third-party infrastructure. Each provider processes data as part of operating the service, and each keeps its own logs and backups under its own retention policy:
- Vercel for hosting.
- Neon for the PostgreSQL database.
- Cloudflare for inbound mail routing and security services.
- Redis for transient application state.
- A configured sending provider for external delivery.
Provider logs and backup deletion do not necessarily follow the inbox countdown. A backup taken before your inbox expired may persist until that provider's own backup rotation passes, even though the inbox is no longer reachable through the application. This is the single biggest caveat in this notice, and it is a property of using managed infrastructure rather than a choice specific to TempMails.
Advertising and external content
Public pages may load advertising from Monetag or Google AdSense when those units are enabled. These providers may receive connection and browser information and may use their own storage or tracking mechanisms, governed by their own policies rather than this one. The application does not send message contents to advertising providers as an advertising input.
Advertising scripts run on the surrounding page, not inside your mail. Blocking remote images in a message does not block advertising scripts on the page around it, because the two are unrelated: images in a message are blocked to stop a sender learning that you opened it, while ad scripts are part of the page itself.
External links in a message are governed by the policies of wherever they lead.
Cookies
Three cookies matter:
| Cookie | Purpose | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|
| Private access cookie | Keeps your browser attached to your inbox | While the inbox is active |
| Pseudonymous device cookie | Abuse prevention and rate limiting | Set for abuse-prevention purposes |
| Provider cookies | Advertising and security, where enabled | Set by those providers |
Clearing your cookies removes browser access to your inbox. If you have not saved your recovery token, that access cannot be restored.
Your choices
You can delete your inbox, or individual messages, at any time, and the deletion takes effect immediately in the application. Clearing cookies removes browser access. Keep your recovery token private — anyone holding it can reopen your inbox. Remote images are blocked unless you choose to load them, which prevents a sender from confirming that you read a message.
If you want to be contacted at an address that persists, do not use a temporary inbox for that purpose; nothing here is designed to keep you reachable.
Contact form submissions
The contact form on the contact page is the one place where you deliberately send content to the operator. A submission is delivered as email and is not stored by the application: no database row is created, and the only address taken from you is the one you supply so a reply can reach you, which is set as the reply address on that notification. The automated abuse controls that apply to the rest of the public site apply here too — a rate limit, a field that only a form filler completes, and, where enforced, a security challenge provided by Cloudflare Turnstile, which processes connection information in order to decide whether you are a person.
Do not use the form for inbox credentials, recovery tokens, or the contents of a message you received. Nothing in an investigation needs them, and the contact page says what to send instead.
Artificial-intelligence features
No message that arrives in a temporary inbox is sent to an artificial-intelligence provider. The automated screening that does run is rule-based abuse control — rate limits, blocklists and spam-pattern matching — which works from metadata such as sender, recipient and sending rate rather than from the meaning of your mail. The AI roadmap lists the features the operator intends to evaluate and states plainly that none of them is live.
Any future AI-assisted feature would require all of the following before it processed a real message: a per-inbox opt-in that is off by default and can be revoked; a privacy notice naming the provider and the fields sent, published before the feature is enabled; a contractual limit that the content is not used for advertising, profiling or model training; and no change to how long messages are kept. Drafting the text on this site may use AI assistance, but that is an editorial process applied to our own pages and never to your mail.
Contact
Write to founder@tempmails.live, the operator's business contact, for privacy requests or questions about processing. The same address is published on the contact page and the company page. Describe your request without sharing inbox credentials or unnecessary sensitive information. Read the terms and acceptable use policy alongside this notice, since they set out the limits of what the service undertakes to do.