Disposable email glossary

A service that issues you stable, long-lived email addresses that forward to your real inbox. Each alias can be turned off independently when it starts attracting spam. Examples: SimpleLogin, Addy.io, Apple's Hide My Email. Different from a disposable inbox, which is short-lived and standalone. See our disposable vs. alias guide for a full comparison.

A configuration where a mail server accepts mail to any local part at a domain — *@yourdomain.tld all goes to one inbox. tenmin.app uses a catch-all rule via Cloudflare Email Routing.

An email address with an automatic, short expiration. After the expiry window — typically minutes to hours — the address stops accepting mail and any messages received are deleted. Synonyms: temp mail, throwaway email, burner email, 10-minute mail.

An email authentication standard where the sending mail server cryptographically signs outgoing messages with a private key, and recipients verify the signature against a public key published in DNS. Helps recipients detect tampered or forged mail. tenmin.app is receive-only and so doesn't sign mail, but every inbound message we accept may have a DKIM signature attached.

A DNS-based policy layered on top of SPF and DKIM. A domain owner publishes a DMARC record telling recipients what to do (none, quarantine, reject) when SPF/DKIM checks fail. DMARC is what blocks most simple email spoofing in 2026.

Cloudflare's free service for receiving mail at a domain. Accepts inbound SMTP for verified domains and forwards to either a real mailbox or — interestingly — a Cloudflare Worker. The mechanism tenmin.app is built on. See our behind-the-scenes guide.

Time-to-live: a duration after which stored data becomes unavailable. tenmin.app sets a 600-second TTL on every KV write, which is what gives us free auto-deletion of messages. See how tenmin works under the hood.

The opening commands of an SMTP conversation. The sending server announces its hostname with HELO (or EHLO for extended SMTP). The hostname appearing in HELO/EHLO is one of several signals receivers use to assess reputation.

Cloudflare's globally distributed key-value store with strong consistency on writes and eventual consistency on reads. Supports a built-in TTL on every put. tenmin.app stores each inbox as a single key (inbox:<id>) containing a JSON array of messages.

A piece of content — typically a PDF, ebook, template, or "ultimate guide to X" — offered in exchange for an email signup. The entire value of the signup is delivered in the welcome email, which is why disposable addresses are well-suited to lead-magnet downloads.

The portion of an email address before the @. In [email protected], the local part is abc123. RFC 5321 caps the local part at 64 characters; tenmin.app's regex permits only [a-z0-9._-]{1,64}.

The standard for representing rich email content — multiple parts, attachments, character encodings, HTML alongside plain text. tenmin.app uses the postal-mime npm package to parse incoming MIME envelopes.

A DNS record that tells the world which mail servers accept mail for a domain. When you send mail to [email protected], the sending server looks up the MX records for tenmin.app and connects to the highest-priority entry.

Embedding a "tag" in the local part of an email address using a plus sign — e.g., [email protected]. Most modern providers route this to [email protected] while preserving the tag in headers, so you can filter on it. Free and useful for organising signups, but doesn't hide your real address.

A property of services that accept incoming mail but cannot send mail out. tenmin.app is receive-only by design — there's no SMTP outbound, no reply button. This prevents the service from being used for spam.

HTML that has had dangerous elements (scripts, styles, event handlers, javascript: URLs, iframes) removed. tenmin.app sanitises every inbound email's HTML and then renders the result inside a sandboxed iframe — two layers of defence against XSS.

A DNS record listing the IP addresses authorised to send mail for a domain. Recipients check inbound mail's source IP against the SPF record; mismatches are a signal that the message may be spoofed.

Synonym for disposable email. The "throwaway" framing emphasises intent — you intend to use the address once and discard it — rather than the technical mechanism.

A one-pixel transparent image hosted on a sender's server, embedded in marketing emails. When your mail client renders the message, it requests the image, and the sender's server logs the request along with your IP and timestamp — effectively a read receipt. See our email privacy 101 guide.

A small JavaScript function that runs on Cloudflare's edge network in response to HTTP requests, scheduled events, or — relevant here — incoming email events from Email Routing. tenmin.app uses two: one for ingesting mail, one for serving the read API.