A burner email for the signups you want to walk away from

Like a burner phone for your inbox: a throwaway address you use once and abandon, with nothing tying it back to the real you.

What is a burner email?

A burner email is a throwaway address you create for a single purpose and then abandon. The name comes from burner phones — cheap, prepaid handsets people use for one situation and discard so the number cannot be traced back to them. A burner email works the same way for your inbox: it gives you a functioning address for a short time, absorbs whatever you needed to receive, and then disappears. There is no account to close and no history to clean up, because there was never an account in the first place.

On 15 Minute Mail every burner address lives for fifteen minutes. That is deliberately short. A burner's value is that it stops existing before it can become a liability — before it collects spam, before it can be linked to your other activity, and before a data breach could expose it.

Why people use a burner instead of their real address

The most common reason is simple self-defense against clutter and tracking. But burners solve some specific problems that a normal inbox cannot:

• Second accounts. Many services allow only one account per email. A burner lets you register an additional account — a test profile, a separate persona, a spare login — without exposing another of your real addresses.
• One-time downloads. When a site gates a file behind an email form purely to build a marketing list, a burner gets you the file and skips the follow-up.
• Free trials. Trying a product that wants an email up front? A burner lets you evaluate it without committing your primary address to their CRM.
• Untrusted sites. If a site looks sketchy or has no clear privacy policy, a burner limits the fallout to an address that is about to vanish.

Burner email vs. disposable vs. anonymous

These terms overlap, but the emphasis differs. A disposable email stresses that the inbox is throwaway and spam-blocking. An anonymous email stresses that no personal information is attached. A burner email stresses the deliberate, single-use "use once and drop it" behavior. In practice, 15 Minute Mail is all three at once: every address is disposable, carries no personal data, and is meant to be burned after a single task.

What a burner email cannot do

A burner is built to be forgotten, which makes it the wrong tool for anything you need to hold on to. Because the address expires and has no password:

• You cannot use it for password resets — you will lose the ability to recover the account.
• You should never use it for financial, medical, or government logins.
• You cannot rely on it for long-running conversations or anything you will need to reference later.

If you want the privacy of a masked address but need to keep receiving mail long-term, use a permanent forwarding alias instead of a burner.

How to create one

There is no setup. Open the homepage and a burner address is already generated and listening for mail. Copy it, drop it into whatever form needs an email, read the message that arrives, and let the timer run out. When it expires, the address and everything in it are permanently deleted.

Frequently asked questions

• Do I need to sign up for a burner email? No. An address is generated automatically when you open the homepage — no registration at all.
• How long does a burner last? About 15 minutes, after which the address and its messages are permanently deleted.
• Can I make more than one? Yes. Generate a fresh burner any time you need a new one.
• Will sites accept a burner address? Most do. Some services block disposable domains at signup; if so, you will need a permanent email for that site.
• Is it anonymous? No personal data is attached, though a determined service can still see technical signals like your IP. See our anonymous email page for the nuances.