ztrash: a burner email you pay for with shielded ZEC

Every "free" temporary email service is paid for somehow. Usually with your inbox contents, your IP, and a domain that half the internet already blocks. I wanted a burner inbox that costs a coffee, asks for nothing, and cannot tie the payment back to me. Shielded Zcash is the only payment rail that makes the last part true, so I built ztrash around it.

ztrash.com gives you a disposable email inbox in about a minute. No account. No email address of your own. No phone number. No logs. You pay a small amount of shielded ZEC to the inbox's own address, and the inbox goes live at the next block.

How it works

1. Go to ztrash.com and pick a slug. That becomes your address, for example coffee@ztrash.com.
2. The site shows a QR code and a unified address. Pay the quoted amount from any shielded wallet. Zingo and Cake open with the amount prefilled. Zodl works too, you just paste the address.
3. The inbox activates when the payment lands in a block, usually 75 seconds or so. You get a viewing key shown once. Save it or bookmark the private link, that is your only way back in.
4. Use the address wherever you need it. Verification codes are pulled out of incoming mail and shown in the tab title so you do not even have to open the message.

When the time is up, the inbox and everything in it is deleted. Pay the same address again before that and the time extends.

What the server can and cannot see

This is the part I care most about, and the reason I think ZEC holders will get it.

• The server holds a viewing key, never a spending key. It can detect your payment. It cannot move the funds. If the box is ever seized, there is nothing to spend.
• Every inbox gets its own diversified address from one account. Two payments to two inboxes are not linkable to each other on chain, and neither is linkable to you.
• Mail is encrypted at rest and decrypted in your browser with a per-inbox viewing key that only you hold. The database sees ciphertext. Attachments included.
• Hosted in Iceland, reachable over Tor at an .onion mirror (the site sends an Onion-Location header, so Tor Browser offers it automatically).
• The code the site serves is verifiable. Every deploy publishes an integrity manifest and a record to a public transparency repo, and there is a guide on the site for checking that what your browser loaded matches it.

There is no analytics, no third-party scripts, and no email provider in the middle. ztrash runs its own receive-only SMTP listener.

Pricing

Prices are quoted in ZEC at the current rate when you create the inbox.

Inbox lifetime	Price
24 hours	about $1
7 days	$4
30 days	$12
90 days	$25
1 year	$70

The 1-year tier comes with optional expiry reminders over Web Push or ntfy, so you can top it up before it dies. Reminders are opt-in and carry no content, just a nudge.

A few extras

• Aliases. Mail to anything.yourslug@ztrash.com lands in your inbox, so you can hand out a different tag to every site and burn a tag when it starts getting spam.
• Works where the big temp-mail domains are blocked. ztrash is not on the disposable-domain blocklists that most signup forms use.
• Codes surface automatically. The one-time code in a verification email shows up on the message list and in the tab title.

What it is not

Receive-only. You cannot send from a ztrash address. If you lose the viewing key there is no recovery, because I never had it. And it is a one-person project, so if you hit something odd, tell me and I will fix it.

Why I am posting here

Free2Z is where people actually spend shielded ZEC on small things, and that is exactly the use ztrash was built for. If you try it, I would like to know two things: did the payment flow feel right in your wallet, and what would make you use it more? Longer inboxes, a credit balance you pay once and draw down, a Monero option, something else. That feedback decides what gets built next.

https://ztrash.com, or over Tor: http://qmjt3c74g67jmelpw3frkwuxoa3xw56xqkpbdhxd2yflfvvc7hhkgvqd.onion/

Use it. Trash it. Disappear.