How does a burner email work, and why is it like a burner phone?
A burner email works the way a burner phone does: it gives people a way to reach you that you can cut off at any time, without touching your real number or address. When you are done, you get rid of it, and anything sent to it afterwards goes nowhere near you.
The comparison holds up well:
- No contract, no identity. A prepaid phone does not need your name, and neither does a YelMail burner. There is no account to create.
- Disposable by design. You expect to throw it away, so you are not bothered when it fills up with junk.
- Your main line stays clean. Spam and marketing pile up on the burner, not on the number or inbox you actually use.
There is one important difference: a YelMail burner is receive-only. People can send to it, but you cannot send or reply from it. That makes it ideal for sign-ups and confirmations, and unsuitable for back-and-forth conversations.
For the full background on how temporary inboxes work, read what temporary email is.
When to use a burner email instead of your real one
Use a burner email whenever you expect to get something once and do not want an ongoing relationship with the sender. If the honest answer to "do I want to hear from these people next month?" is no, reach for a burner.
Good moments for a burner:
- Giveaways and contests that ask for an email to enter
- Webinar and event registrations where you only need the join link
- Gated content like reports, templates or sample chapters
- New apps and sites you want to try before trusting them with your real address
- Public Wi-Fi portals at airports, hotels and cafés
- Quote requests on comparison sites, when you want the price without a flood of follow-up emails
Keep your real email for anything tied to money, identity or security. Banks, payment services, government portals, your employer and your main social accounts all need an address you will still control next year.
A burner is also not a way around a platform's rules. Using burners to dodge a ban, create accounts in bulk or claim the same offer again and again goes against our acceptable use policy.
When should you burn a burner email?
Burn it as soon as it has done its job, or the moment it starts getting mail you did not ask for. There is no benefit to keeping a burner around once the code is in and the download has started.
Signs it is time to burn:
- You have the verification code, link or file you came for.
- Marketing emails start arriving more often than you expected.
- Mail shows up from companies you never gave the address to, a clue the list was shared or sold.
- You are about to leave a shared or public computer.
On YelMail, burning takes one click. Delete destroys the inbox and every message in it right away, then creates a fresh address in its place.
If you forget, the burner burns itself. Each email is deleted 2 hours after it arrives, and the inbox expires after 2 hours of inactivity. Once it is gone, it cannot be recovered, so there is nothing left for anyone to dig up later. That automatic clean-up is what makes a burner safe to hand out without a second thought.
Can a burner email last longer than a few hours?
Yes, with Premium. The free burner is built to be short-lived, but some jobs take longer, such as a two-week trial, a package in transit or a side project you want to keep apart from your personal inbox.
Premium keeps email for 30 days and lets you hold up to 25 addresses at once, saved to your account. You can still delete any of them whenever you like, so you keep the same control, just on a longer fuse.
A few other Premium features suit longer-lived burners:
- Forwarding sends incoming mail to a verified personal address, so a burner can catch something important without you checking it every day.
- Custom names make it easy to tell your burners apart, for example one for travel bookings and another for a hobby forum.
- Larger attachments, up to 25 MB instead of 5 MB.
For a closer look at keeping an address for weeks instead of hours, see long term temporary email.