Get a verification code without giving your email
Strictly, you cannot. A verification code is sent to an address, so there has to be an address for it to be sent to. What you can avoid is giving the site your address — the one attached to everything else you own.
So the honest version of the question is: how do you receive a code at an address that costs you nothing to abandon, and read it without setting up yet another inbox to check?
Three ways people do this, and what each is good for
- An alias service. A permanent address that forwards to your real one, per site, revocable. The right answer for accounts you intend to keep — and the wrong one for a form you will never return to, because you now have an alias to manage forever.
- A second free mailbox. Free, and it works, but it is a second inbox to log into, and over a year it accumulates exactly the mess you opened it to avoid.
- A throwaway address. No account, no setup, no cleanup. It exists for as long as you need it and then it does not.
The step everybody forgets to count
Every throwaway service hands you an address and stops there, which leaves the slowest part of the job untouched. You paste the address, wait, open a message written to sell you something, and hunt through it for six digits — or worse, work out which of five links is the confirmation and which is the unsubscribe.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Clicking the wrong link in a confirmation email does not fail loudly; it quietly does something else, and you find out later that you never confirmed anything.
What this one does instead
SpareInbox reads the message when it arrives and puts what you came for at the top of the card: the code in large monospace type with a copy button, or the confirmation link as a real button. Sender and subject sit underneath in small type, because they are only there to tell one message from another.
When it finds nothing, it says so and shows you the message. It does not offer a link that might be the right one — a wrong link in a signup flow is worse than no link, because you click it and stop looking.
How long you have
The address appears on the page immediately and mail shows up on its own, with no refreshing. Messages are kept for seven days; the address itself keeps working as long as you keep opening it, and is cleared out a month after you stop.
Treat the address as public while you are using it — anyone who has it can read its mail. Codes for a forum, yes. A password reset for anything you care about, no. When a throwaway address is the wrong tool.