I Built a Disposable Email Service on Cloudflare Workers + Upstash Redis. Here's the Architecture.

I Built a Disposable Email Service on Cloudflare Workers + Upstash Redis. Here's the Architecture.

I run VanishInbox, a free disposable email service. No signup, no backend server in the traditional sense, no database in the traditional sense either. Just Cloudflare and Redis doing the work. Here's how it's put together.

The problem

Disposable email sounds trivial until you sit down to build it. You need an address that receives real mail from real mail servers, stores it somewhere, and then deletes itself without anyone lifting a finger. Three requirements pull in different directions: you need to accept SMTP traffic, you need fast reads for the inbox UI, and you need guaranteed deletion without running a cron job that might fail silently at 3am and leave stale data sitting around.

Most tutorials on "build a temp mail service" skip straight to a database schema. That's the wrong starting point. The interesting part is the deletion.