The permanent-alias alternative to temp-mail
Temp-mail, 10MinuteMail, and Mailinator hide your address — until the inbox expires, your account becomes unrecoverable, and the signup form blocks the domain anyway. EmailAlias gives you the same hide-my-address benefit without the disposability tax.
Why aliases beat temp-mail for most use cases
Permanent, not 10-minute
Temp-mail inboxes expire in minutes to hours. That's fine for a one-shot download — and a disaster the moment a service emails you 2FA codes, a password reset, or an important update later. Permanent aliases keep working as long as the account does.
Private, not public
On Mailinator (and quietly on others), the inbox is publicly readable — anyone who guesses or sees the address gets full read access. EmailAlias inboxes are private: forwarded mail goes to your real inbox, and nobody else can read it.
Accepted by signup forms
Services use commercial blocklists to reject known disposable domains (temp-mail.org, mailinator.com, 10minutemail.com, etc.). EmailAlias addresses look like normal email and aren't on those lists — signups go through without the "please use a real email" friction.
Account-recovery actually works
Created a game account or forum profile via temp-mail, then forgot the password months later? The recovery email is gone, the inbox is gone, the account is gone. With permanent aliases, the password reset lands in your real inbox every time.
Feature comparison
Pricing side-by-side
Temp-mail is free by design — that's its main selling point. EmailAlias also has a free tier; Premium adds custom domains, reply-from-alias, and sender-risk alerts.
Free plan
Paid plan
How to switch from temp-mail in 5 steps
Most users finish in under 15 minutes. There's nothing to "export" — temp-mail inboxes are gone — so the work is mostly recovering the accounts worth keeping.
- 1
Inventory the services you used temp-mail for
Think about the accounts you created via a disposable inbox. Most fall into two buckets: throwaway signups (you don't care anymore — leave them) and accounts you'd actually like to keep but lost access to (game accounts, forum profiles, software trials).
- 2
Create your EmailAlias account
Sign up at emailalias.io with your real inbox as the destination. Free gives you 10 permanent aliases — enough for the next stretch of signups. Premium starts with a 7-day free trial if you want custom domains or unlimited aliases.
- 3
Recover the accounts you actually want
For each account you'd like to keep but used a temp-mail address for: try the service's account-recovery flow with the original alias. Most services let you update the email on file via password-reset-then-change-email if you can still log in. If you can't log in and the temp-mail is dead, the account is effectively gone — note it for future reference.
- 4
Install the EmailAlias browser extension
Add the extension on Chrome or Firefox. From now on, every signup form gets a one-click alias generator inline — no jumping to a temp-mail tab, no copy-paste, no risk of the address expiring before the confirmation email arrives.
- 5
Stop using temp-mail for new signups
Going forward, generate a permanent alias on EmailAlias for each new service. If it turns out to be spam, disable that one alias in one click — the rest of your inbox is unaffected. The whole reason temp-mail exists (one-time exposure) is solved better by per-service aliases.
Frequently asked questions
The questions we get most often from people moving away from disposable inboxes.
Is EmailAlias better than disposable email services?
Unlike throwaway email services, EmailAlias gives you permanent, encrypted aliases you control. You can receive mail indefinitely, reply from your alias, and disable it anytime. It's privacy without the inconvenience. Disposable emails expire and can't receive future messages — aliases are yours forever.
Can I move my aliases between providers?
Aliases on a shared provider domain (e.g. @emailalias.io) aren't portable — they live on our domain and stay with us. Aliases on a custom domain (yourdomain.com) are fully portable: you keep the domain, point its MX records at a new provider, re-create the same local-parts on their side, and the addresses keep working — provided the new provider supports custom local-parts (most do; some only issue random codes). Custom domains are a Premium feature on EmailAlias, but for anyone who plans to use aliases long-term, it's vendor-independence insurance worth having.
What does Premium include?
Unlimited aliases, up to 5 custom domains, unlimited verified forwarding inboxes (so each alias can route to the right mailbox), send & reply from any alias, real-time leak detection with exposure analytics, and priority processing — all for $4/month or $35/year (save 27%).
Why is the temp-mail inbox expiring a problem?
Three real-world failures. (1) Two-factor codes arrive minutes after signup — but the inbox already expired. (2) Password reset for an account you actually liked — but the inbox is gone, so the account is unrecoverable. (3) A service emails you about a refund, abuse report, or important update months later — and the message bounces. Permanent aliases solve all three: the address keeps working as long as the account does.
Is the temp-mail inbox actually public?
On most temp-mail services, yes — anyone who guesses (or sees) the address can read the inbox without authentication. Mailinator is the most explicit about this: every @mailinator.com inbox is public. 10MinuteMail and temp-mail.org generate random addresses, which is a soft form of privacy, but anyone with the link to your session can see your inbox until it expires. EmailAlias inboxes are private — only the account owner sees forwarded mail.
Why do some signup forms reject my temp-mail address?
Services maintain blocklists of known disposable-email domains (temp-mail.org, mailinator.com, 10minutemail.com, getairmail.com, etc.) because they get abused for trial farming, fake-account creation, and review-bombing. Services use commercial APIs to detect these and reject signup. EmailAlias addresses look like normal email (@emailalias.io or your own custom domain) and aren't on disposable blocklists, so they're accepted everywhere.
Isn't temp-mail more anonymous than EmailAlias?
Anonymous to the sender, yes — slightly. With temp-mail, the sender sees a random @temp-mail address; with EmailAlias, they see a random @emailalias.io address. Both achieve the same thing on the recipient side. The real difference: temp-mail also gives you anonymity to the provider (no account, no destination tied to your real identity), while EmailAlias does require an account because we forward to your real inbox. If you absolutely need sender anonymity AND no provider relationship, temp-mail is the right tool — but you give up reply, recovery, longevity, and acceptance in exchange.
When does temp-mail still make sense?
For truly one-shot use cases where you'll never need that address again: free-trial sites you'll abandon in five minutes, document downloads gated behind an email wall, prank or test inboxes. The category exists for a reason — it's just the wrong tool for any account you might want to come back to. For everything else, a permanent alias gives you the same hide-my-address benefit without the disposability tax.
See also our deep-dive on why EmailAlias is not disposable email.
Get the hide-my-address benefit. Skip the disposability tax.
Permanent aliases, private inbox, reply-from-alias, account recovery that works. Start your 7-day free trial — no credit card on the free tier.