tenmin.app exists because most of the email you receive isn't email — it's receipts for things you signed up for once and never thought about again. A discount code, a one-time download link, a forum verification, the PDF behind a paywall. None of those belong in your real inbox; they belong somewhere disposable. That somewhere is here.
What it is
tenmin.app generates a random address ending in @tenmin.app and shows you anything sent to it for the next ten minutes. After the timer ends, both the address and every message it received vanish. There is no signup, no account, no password, no recovery flow. Closing the tab is the only logout we ship.
The ten-minute window is enough to receive a confirmation code, copy a download link, or click a verification button — the kinds of one-shot interactions that account for most throwaway-email use. If you need longer, hitting Extend resets the timer; hitting Refresh swaps you to a brand-new address.
Why we built it
The disposable-email category is full of services that quietly defeat the point: they require an account, attach ads that track you across the web, retain logs for weeks, or sell access to the inbox itself. We wanted the opposite — a service so cheap to run that we could promise not to do any of that and actually mean it.
Cloudflare's free tier turns out to be the right shape for this. Email Routing accepts incoming mail at our domain at no cost, Workers run the parsing logic for free up to a generous daily limit, and KV storage with automatic TTL gives us free auto-deletion without a cron job or a database. The whole stack is held together by less than a thousand lines of code.
How it's built
We've kept the architecture deliberately boring so it's easy to audit:
- Email arrival. Cloudflare Email Routing catches anything sent to
*@tenmin.appand hands it to a Worker. - Parsing. The Worker uses postal-mime to decode the MIME envelope, extracts the local-part as the inbox ID, and validates it against a strict
[a-z0-9._-]{1,64}pattern. - Storage. Messages are written to Cloudflare KV with a 600-second TTL. That TTL is the auto-deletion mechanism — no scheduled cleanup, no garbage collector.
- Display. The frontend polls a tiny read-only Worker every three seconds and renders new messages in a sandboxed iframe with scripts and inline handlers stripped.
That's the entire system. There's no relational database, no message queue, no background job runner, and no external API spend. The two Workers and the KV namespace live inside Cloudflare's free quota at typical traffic levels, which is what keeps the service free without a Patreon tier or premium plan.
What it isn't
tenmin.app is receive-only. You cannot send mail from a@tenmin.app address — there's no SMTP outbound, no "reply" button, no forwarding configured by default. This is a feature, not a limitation: a service that sends mail is a service that gets used for spam, and a service that gets used for spam gets blocked by the receiving providers and ruins the address space for everyone else.
It also isn't a privacy-grade tool for high-stakes communication. The address is public in the sense that anyone who knows or guesses the local part can read what was sent to it during its ten-minute lifetime. Use it for signups, not for sensitive material.
Who's behind it
tenmin.app is a small independent project, not a venture-backed startup. It has a single maintainer who prefers to stay out of the spotlight; the editorial voice across the Guides, FAQ, and policy pages is consistent because it's all written by the same hand.
If you want to reach out about a bug, an idea, a partnership, or a takedown, the contact page lists the right channel for each. If the service has been useful to you and you want to chip in toward the domain renewal, the Tip button in the header points at Buy Me a Coffee.
For correspondence — including accuracy questions on the guides — email [email protected]. Editorial corrections are made openly with a dated note at the bottom of the affected page.
What's next
We have no roadmap and no monetisation goals beyond keeping the lights on. The version of the service you're looking at today is the version we plan to keep maintaining. If anything changes meaningfully — pricing, retention, ownership — we'll update this page and announce it on the home screen first.