The hour-long inbox for mail with a human in the loop
Most verification emails arrive in seconds, but a whole category of mail does not: waitlist invitations, registrations a moderator approves by hand, license keys and receipts "sent within the hour", beta access that a person on the other side has to click a button to grant. A 1 hour temp mail exists for exactly that mail - the kind you cannot schedule but also do not want landing in your real inbox.
DustMail runs its own inbound mail server (Haraka) and database, so a 1 hour address on dustmail.net receives everything the sender delivers during those sixty minutes - no bounced retries, no upstream greylisting against third-party rotators, and a live view that updates the moment mail lands.
When one hour is the right window
- Waitlist and beta confirmations - Invitations sent in batches, whenever the batch goes out.
- Manually approved registrations - Forums and communities where a moderator reviews signups.
- License keys and download links - Vendors that email the key minutes to an hour after checkout.
- Multi-service setups - One address for a chain of related signups completed in a single sitting.
- Testing email flows - Watch a full onboarding sequence arrive without seeding your real address.
1 hour temp mail vs shorter and longer durations
Thirty minutes covers most automated flows, but the moment a human is part of the sending side - an approval, a batch job, a support agent - the clock stops being predictable, and a 30 minute temp mail can expire with the mail still unsent. Twenty-four hours works, but keeps the address alive far longer than the task needs. One hour is the honest middle: generous enough for humans and queues, gone before the address is worth anything to a scraper. For a full day's coverage, use the 24 hour temp mail; for quick codes, the 15 minute temp mail is snappier.
Privacy guarantees
DustMail does not log IP addresses, does not sell data, and does not retain inbox contents past expiry. An hour-long inbox follows the same contract as the ten-minute one: nothing should outlive the inbox itself. Read more about our approach in our privacy guide.
Frequently asked questions
Is the 1 hour inbox free?
Yes. Sixty minutes is one of the free durations - pick it from the duration menu or open this page and the inbox starts at one hour automatically. No account, no payment. Durations beyond 24 hours and custom domains live on the Premium plan.
Does the timer reset when a new email arrives?
No. The lifetime is fixed when the inbox is created: sixty minutes from generation, whatever arrives in between. If you realise mid-way that an hour will not be enough, generate a fresh inbox with a longer duration and use that address for the signup instead.
What happens to the messages after the hour ends?
The address stops being publicly served and its contents are removed on a fixed cleanup schedule - there is no recovery step and no way to re-register the same address to read old mail. The details are in our privacy policy.