Inboxen review 2026: this open-source, self-hosted email alias project, its AGPL-3.0 license, current status and alternatives like SimpleLogin and addy.io.
Inboxen is an open-source project for generating disposable email inbox aliases, built with Python, Django and PostgreSQL and released under the AGPL-3.0 license. Rather than being run by a company, it exists as a community-maintained codebase that anyone can inspect, modify and self-host.
The project originally operated a public reference instance at inboxen.org so people could try disposable aliasing without running their own server, but that hosted instance has since been shut down, with the site displaying a closure notice and associated user data being deleted. The source code itself remains active and available for self-hosting, with the repository now maintained on Codeberg.
At its core, Inboxen generates unique, randomly-addressed email aliases that a user can hand out instead of their real address when signing up for websites or services. Mail sent to an alias is received and stored or forwarded through the user's own Inboxen instance, and individual aliases can be disabled or deleted if they start attracting spam, without ever exposing the underlying real address.
Because it is a self-hosted Django application, Inboxen gives operators full control over their data and infrastructure, including database backups, retention policies and server configuration, in contrast to trusting a third-party company to manage that data on their behalf.
Inboxen carries no license fee and has never been sold as a paid product; the AGPL-3.0-licensed source code is free to download, modify and deploy. The only cost involved is the infrastructure needed to self-host an instance, such as a small VPS or home server capable of running Python, Django and PostgreSQL.
With the original public inboxen.org instance now shut down, there is currently no ready-made hosted option to sign up for; anyone wanting to use Inboxen today needs to deploy and maintain their own instance from the Codeberg repository, or consider a hosted commercial alternative such as SimpleLogin or addy.io instead.
No, the original public instance at inboxen.org has been shut down; the project's open-source code remains available for anyone to deploy their own self-hosted instance.
Yes, Inboxen's source code is entirely free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no license fee to self-host it.
Inboxen is built with Python and the Django web framework, using PostgreSQL as its database, with HTML, JavaScript and SCSS on the front end.
Yes, the full codebase needed to run your own Inboxen instance is maintained on Codeberg, requiring Git, Python, PostgreSQL, Node.js and GNU Make to set up.
Inboxen is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0).
Hosted commercial alias services such as SimpleLogin, addy.io (formerly AnonAddy) and Firefox Relay offer similar disposable email aliasing without requiring self-hosting.