Gmail might soon offer temporary email addresses

You probably already know how a temporary email address works. There are plenty of services that offer such inboxes online. Most even do it absolutely for free. Honestly, it’s kind of surprising that none of the major tech players have offered the service up until now.

Well, that might soon change. The good folks over at Android Authority spotted some references in the latest Gmail Android app to something called “Shield Email”. The concept is simple – Google gives you a temporary email address to give out to third parties instead of your actual email. Then, as you receive an email to your temporary address, it gets forwarded to your regular email inbox. If, at any point, you decide you want to no longer receive emails on your temporary email, you just get rid of it instead of dealing with spam filters and the like.

We presume that just like most existing temporary email services out there, Google will only allow incoming email into the temporary email and not outgoing mail since that would open the door to more nefarious and annoying use cases for the service.

Also, as per a screenshot within Autofill with Google, also uncovered by Android Authority, you might be able to have more than one “Shielded Email” at a time. This would make things even more versatile. For now, the “Shielded Email” feature is only a conceptual thing spotted in a few text references and UIs and not something officially discussed in any capacity by Google. So, it might happen, but it might, just as likely, get axed. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on any developments.