Burner Emails for Firefox and Chrome

Burner Emails is a free browser extension and web service that adds options to Firefox and Chrome to create throwaway email addresses.

Spam is still a big issue on the Internet and while email providers like Google or Microsoft got better at identifying spam emails so that these don't even land in your inbox, it is still fair to say that most Internet users will encounter spam on a regular basis if email is used.

Throwaway email services, also known as disposable email services, come to the rescue. While you may have other options at your disposal to deal with spam, email aliases or custom domains for emails, throwaway email services like Yopmail add something to the table that these other options don't.

Besides being easy to use, many require no setup at all, they are also not associated with you in any way.

But there are disadvantages as well, and the two main ones are that you are not in full control of the email address and that some services don't reserve email addresses so that they may be reused by others.

Burner Emails

Burner Emails is a new browser extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox that integrates directly in the browser. Note that it requires that you create an account with the service before you can start using it.

Account creation is free and it ensures that email addresses are assigned only to you when you use the service.

You will notice a new icon attached to email fields once you have installed the browser extension in a supported browser. A click on the icon creates a new email throwaway email address used for that particular service.

The service remembers the email addresses that it has created for you and displays them when you click on the extension icon.

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You may wonder how you access emails sent to the burner email; Burner Email forwards the email to the account that you used to sign up with.

Note: You may leak your real email address or other personal information under certain circumstances because of the redirect. If you open the email as HTML email in your email client, you may reveal information. You may reveal additional information if you click on any link from within the email client.

Email addresses that you create using the service remain available until you disable them. Just switch them to off or throw them in the trash right away to break the redirect to your real email address.

Note that you can't regain access to emails that you delete anymore.

Closing Words

Burner Emails is a useful service to create throwaway email addresses. The created addresses are not fully anonymous as they are linked to an email account that you need to specify during signup. You can use another throwaway email address for that though.

The service collects some information including your email address and usage data.

..Usage Data may include information such as your computer's Internet Protocol address (e.g. IP address), browser type, browser version, the pages of our Service that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data.