Temporary Email: Real Disposable Inboxes for Developers
Every developer knows the pain: you need to test an email flow, but you don't want to use your real inbox. Or you're signing up for a service trial and don't want the inevitable spam. Free temp email services exist, but they're unreliable, look suspicious to services, and can't send outbound mail.
We built Temporary Email to solve this properly.
Real Inboxes, Real Functionality
25cent.cloud Temporary Email creates actual email inboxes at `@temp.25cent.cloud`. These aren't throwaway aliases — they're real inboxes that can:
- Send emails — Compose and send from your temp address
- Receive emails — Full inbox with threading and attachments (up to 25MB)
- Reply and forward — Interact naturally, just like any email account
- Auto-forward — Set rules to forward matching emails to your real inbox
- Webhook notifications — POST incoming email data to your API in real-time
Why Developers Love It
The webhook feature is the developer superpower. When an email arrives at your temp inbox, 25cent.cloud instantly POSTs the full email data (from, to, subject, body, attachments) to your webhook URL. This makes testing email-dependent workflows trivial:
```
POST /api/temp-email/inboxes
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN
Content-Type: application/json
{
"name": "signup-test",
"duration": 2,
"webhookUrl": "https://myapp.com/hooks/email"
}
```
Now when your app sends a verification email to `[email protected]`, your test suite receives the webhook, extracts the verification link, and continues the flow automatically. No polling, no manual checking.
Privacy Without Compromise
Free temp email services have a fundamental problem: anyone who knows the address can read the inbox. Your temp address on 25cent.cloud is private to your account — only you can access it, and it's protected by your authentication.
When the inbox expires (1 hour to 30 days, your choice), all emails are permanently deleted. No archives, no backups, no residual data. The address itself becomes invalid.
Pricing
Each inbox costs 1 quarter (25¢) and includes 1 hour of lifetime. Need longer? Extend for 1 quarter per additional 24 hours. No per-email fees, no storage charges, no attachment surcharges.
Compare that to Mailinator ($159/month), Mailtrap ($15/month), or running your own mail server.
Use Cases
- QA engineers — Test password reset flows, welcome emails, and notification templates
- CI/CD pipelines — Create a temp inbox per test run, verify email delivery, auto-cleanup
- Freelancers — Use project-specific email addresses that disappear when the project ends
- Privacy-conscious users — Sign up for trials and services without spam
- Marketing teams — Test email campaigns across different inbox configurations