Temporary Email for Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Online Classifieds

Published 2026-06-01

How to use disposable email when buying or selling on classifieds sites without exposing your real address to scrapers, scammers, and resellers.

The Marketplace Privacy Problem

Posting a sale ad with your real email address is a small disaster. Within hours, scrapers harvest the address. Within days, you get phishing “is this still available?” emails from fake buyers, Western Union scams, and contact from re-sellers who want to flip your item. Even legitimate buyer questions clutter your real inbox for weeks after the item is sold. A disposable address sidesteps all of it.

Pattern 1: Selling on Craigslist or Similar

Generate a temporary address with a longer lifetime — Premium (1 hour) or Plus (4 hours) work well for short listings; Pro (24 hours) if the listing will stay up for a day.
Use the temp address in the “contact email” field of your listing.
Most platforms (Craigslist, Kijiji) automatically proxy your email through their own anonymising relay anyway, but using a disposable address as the underlying target adds a second layer.
When a real buyer makes contact, switch to phone/SMS for the actual transaction.
Let the temp address expire when the listing comes down. All future scraper-harvested mail goes nowhere.

Pattern 2: Buying / Replying to a Listing

If a listing has a direct email contact (not a relay), use a temp address to send your initial “is this still available?” message. The seller's reply lands in your temp inbox. If they're legitimate and you want to continue, give them your real phone number or move to a long-lived channel. If they're a scammer, the temp address dies and that's the end of the conversation.

Pattern 3: Facebook Marketplace

Facebook Marketplace uses Facebook Messenger for contact — not email — so the temp-email use case here is different: it's about signing up for the secondary marketplace site, like local Buy-Nothing groups that require a separate registration. Use a disposable address for the signup, then unsubscribe once you've joined the relevant groups.

Red Flags That a Buyer Is a Scammer

Wants to pay by check, money order, or wire transfer (especially for “more than asking price”).
Has a courier who will pick up — you ship.
Refuses to speak by phone.
Replies with a chunk of text that doesn't reference any details of your item.
Email comes from a free webmail address with a name that doesn't match the signature.

Using a disposable address doesn't filter these out, but it ensures that once the listing is over, you never hear from them again.