What is it?

anonbox.net provides you free, completely anonymous one-time email addresses. Acquire one in our web interface and use it to receive emails up to the next day. Check for new emails in your browser.

Why do we do it?

As of today there is no easy way of having documents emailed to you anonymously. Be it documents freed by freedom of information acts or just passwords for web services you would not want to give your sacred email address away for. Since anonbox is reachable via a Tor, your anonymity is completely preserved if you create and fetch your mailbox via Tor.

How does it work?

anonbox creates virtual Mailboxes consisting of two parts: a random email address and a random mailbox name, for example uuuuuuuuuuuu@dddddddddddd.anonbox.net https://anonbox.net/dddddddddddd/mmmmmmmmmmmm/ where d simply is a hash of date, u and m are completely random. As you can see there is no direct connection between the email address and the mailbox name other than on our system and you knowing it. To get rid of this secret on our side, we delete the mailbox and the email address five minutes after a successful fetch of a delivered mail. You can check empty Mailboxes as often as you like, unfetched Mailboxes can receive as many mails as you like. All mailboxes are removed at midnight on the following day regardless if they have received mail or were fetched. We take no prisoners.

Do you keep logs?

In principle: no. However, web server logs remain on disc for five minutes in order to implement removing fetched mail. Those logs do not include IP addresses or User-Agents, just the URI of the fetched mailbox, response size, time of the fetch and the HTTP status code.

Can you read the mail?

Quite frankly: Yes. There is no reason to trust us in what we cannot prove. Although we use https for you to fetch the mail and accept TLS secured smtp connections for the incoming mail, we store the mail in cleartext. But we do not know who fetches the mail or who created the mailbox because Tor will not tell us. This said: as administrators of other mail setups we respect our users and their privacy. If the content of the mail is confidential it should be encrypted by the sending party in some anonymous way.

Can anonbox be abused to spam?

No. Neither firewall nor server setup do allow outgoing connections. Therefore anonbox can not be used to send ham or spam. This also means that there will be no bounces.

Is there a message or mailbox size limit?

No.

Disclaimer