Terms of Service

1. The service

ztrash gives you a receive-only email inbox at a random address on ztrash.com, for a lifetime you choose and pay for up front. Mail that arrives is sealed to a key derived from the inbox's viewing key before it is stored. We keep the ciphertext and a hash of the key, and decryption happens in your browser, so we cannot read your mail.

This is not end-to-end encryption. A sender's provider delivers mail to us like any other email, and it exists readable in our server's memory for the moment it takes to seal it. Inboxes cannot send email.

2. Who can use it

You must be old enough to enter a binding agreement where you live, and allowed to use a service like this under the laws that apply to you.

3. Your viewing key

Each inbox has a viewing key, shown once when the inbox is created. It is the only way to read the inbox. We store only a hash of it, so we cannot show it to you again, reset it, or recover it.

Anyone who has the key, or the private link that carries it, can read the inbox and destroy it. Keep it the way you would keep a password. The keyring stores keys in your browser only, so clearing your browser's site data removes them.

If you lose the key, the inbox and its mail are unreadable for good, and support cannot change that. That is the privacy working as designed.

4. Paying

• Inboxes are paid for in shielded Zcash (ZEC). Prices are set in US dollars and converted to a ZEC quote when you generate an inbox. The quote holds for the payment window shown on the payment screen.
• You can pay in more than one transaction. The inbox activates once confirmed payments reach the quote before the window closes.
• Paying more than the quote does not add time to a new inbox.
• To extend an active inbox, pay its address again. A single transaction of at least the original quote adds one full lifetime, and a transaction of twice the quote adds two. Smaller transactions add no time and are not combined.
• We may activate an inbox as soon as its payment appears on the network, before it is mined. If that payment is never mined, the inbox goes back to unpaid.
• You are responsible for sending the right amount to the right address, and for any network fees. Zcash transactions cannot be reversed.

5. Refunds

All sales are final. A shielded payment carries no return address, so in most cases we have no way to send ZEC back. That includes overpayments, extension payments below the quote, and time left on an inbox you destroy.

If you paid and your inbox never activated, contact support with the payment address and, if you have it, the transaction ID. We keep a minimal record of payments for 90 days for exactly this: the payment address, transaction IDs, amounts and times, never the email address. When we can match your payment, we will make it right, usually by activating an equivalent inbox.

6. Limits and delivery

Each lifetime comes with its own message cap and attachment limits, shown before you pay. Mail past the cap is discarded. Attachments over the limit keep their name and size but lose their content. Our mail server refuses messages over its size limit.

We do not guarantee that any particular message will arrive. Some senders refuse disposable addresses, some mail is delayed or lost in transit, and we clean HTML for safety, so some formatting will not display. Expiry reminders are best effort: if our server is offline when one is due, it is skipped.

7. Expiry, deletion and availability

When an inbox's time runs out, it and every message in it are permanently deleted. We deliberately keep no backups of mail, so this cannot be undone. A note that the address expired is kept for 7 days, so a returning visitor sees “expired” rather than “not found”, and then it is deleted too.

You can destroy an inbox yourself at any time. It is deleted at once, along with its payment record, so we cannot restore it and may not be able to look into a payment for it afterwards.

An address is not reserved once its inbox is gone. Do not use an inbox as the recovery email for an account you need to keep past its expiry.

ztrash is a small independent service on a single server. Outages happen, and a serious failure could lose an inbox and its mail before it expires. Treat a long inbox as a durable pseudonym, not an archive, and save anything you cannot afford to lose.

8. Acceptable use

You agree not to use ztrash to:

• break any law that applies to you, or help anyone else do so;
• receive, store or share material that sexually exploits children, or any other content that is illegal to possess;
• commit fraud, phishing or identity theft, or impersonate anyone;
• harass, threaten, stalk or expose anyone, including by using the address trace to target a person;
• attack, probe, overload or scrape the service, get around its rate limits, or create inboxes in bulk that you do not intend to pay for.

We cannot read your mail, so we usually learn about abuse from outside reports. When we have good reason to believe an inbox is being used against these terms, we may destroy it without notice or refund. We may also block traffic that abuses the service.

9. The address trace

The trace shows what public blockchain data says about an address you paste: counterparties, amounts, entity labels, a written summary and a screening verdict. It is informational only.

• Labels come from public sources and heuristics, and can be wrong. The summary is written by an automated language model and can be wrong too.
• The screening verdict is a computed tier. It is not an accusation, and it is not a legal, compliance, tax or investment determination. Do not rely on it to make decisions about a person or their funds.
• To build a trace, we send the address to third-party blockchain data providers and to an AI model provider. Only paste addresses you are comfortable sharing that way.
• Each trace creates a snapshot page that anyone with its link can open. It records the traced address and its public data, carries no account, cookie or visitor profile, and deletes itself after about 90 days.
• Trace builds are rate limited.

10. What we hold, and legal requests

We keep no accounts and no access logs, so we do not record who visits or what they read. Here is what does exist:

• sealed messages and attachments, until the inbox expires or is destroyed;
• for each inbox, its address, a hash of its viewing key, its public encryption key, its payment details and its expiry time;
• the payment records described under Refunds, for 90 days;
• the delivery endpoint for an expiry reminder, if you turn one on, until the inbox is gone;
• trace snapshots, for about 90 days;
• short-lived server logs for diagnosing faults, which rotate out on their own. They never contain IP addresses or inbox addresses, but can include a payment transaction ID.

If we receive a valid legal order that binds us, we will comply with it. We can only hand over what exists, which is the list above. We cannot produce readable mail, and we cannot produce anything that has already been deleted. The FAQ explains the encryption and the reminders in more detail.

11. Other services

Wallets, exchanges, swap services, browser push services, ntfy and any other outside service you use alongside ztrash are run by other people under their own terms. We are not responsible for them, and a link to one is not an endorsement.

12. No warranty

ztrash is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including that the service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, that mail will be delivered, or that trace results are accurate. The service also depends on things we do not control, including the Zcash network, the servers that relay it, price feeds, and senders' mail systems.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost mail, lost access, lost accounts, lost profits or lost data, arising from your use of ztrash. Our total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you paid for the inbox the claim concerns and 10 US dollars. Some places do not allow these limits, so they apply to you only as far as your local law permits.

If your use of ztrash in breach of these terms causes a claim against us, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it.

14. Changes

We may change, suspend or retire any part of the service. If we ever shut ztrash down, we will post notice on this site as early as we reasonably can.

We may update these terms. The date at the top shows when they last changed, and the new version applies from that date. Changing these terms will not shorten an inbox you have already paid for.

15. The rest

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we do not enforce a term, we have not waived it. These terms are the whole agreement between you and us about ztrash.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms, abuse reports and payment problems all go to the support address. Use the support link at the bottom of any page to reveal it. We keep it off the page itself to stay out of spam harvesters' reach.