Email Aliasing
What is Email Aliasing?
Email aliasing services allow you to create unique, random email address for each situation where you would need a functional email address - signing up for a website, subscribing to a newsletter, etc - and have them forward to your true inbox.
Why do I Need Email Aliasing?
Consider the following: a random online account of yours gets caught up in a data breach. When you registered for this account, you registered with your main email, yourname@gmail.com. There are now a variety of ways that I can search for this email address to see where else you have accounts, such as Twitter, Facebook, even bank accounts. Furthermore, I can see from your email address that you use Gmail and I already have one half of your login. Now I just need to guess your password. If I take over your primary email, I can easily take over all your other accounts by abusing the password reset option. Of course, even without taking over the primary account, it’s pretty common for people to reuse the same username (which in many cases is your email address) across several accounts, so now I already have half of your login on many websites (this is known as credential stuffing.) Another peripheral benefit is the ability to control spam. If one of your email addresses gets sold or breached (or the service you gave it to just sucks) and you start getting spam, you can simply disable it and no longer receive that spam. Finally, if you ever switch email providers, these services offer a simple way to change the recipient email inbox without having to log in to dozens (or hundreds) of services and change the email address.
Below I have listed two services that offer email aliasing. Both services offer a free tier that should work just fine for most users, but offer additional useful features for paid users. I have signed up for both and found them both to be functionally the same. The only real difference between the two services is their user interface and their pricing, both of which are affordable and reasonable. I encourage you to try both out and go with whichever one you find most appealing.
There is one small difference: SimpleLogin recently joined Proton, likely in some sort of “subsidiary” capacity. They continue to operate independently, but they will have access to Proton’s infrastructure, resources, and will be integrated into ProtonMail’s service in time. If you like and use Proton, this may be the best solution for you. If you dislike or distrust Proton (or simply don’t want all your eggs in one basket), you may prefer AnonAddy. If you don’t care either way, then this shouldn’t affect your decision-making.
Aliases
Bandwidth
Reply/Send
Mailboxes
Custom domains
PGP Encryption
Free
Unlimited
10MB
0
1
0
Yes
Lite
Unlimited
100MB
20/day
5
1
Yes
Pro
Unlimited
Unlimited
100/day
30
20
Yes
Free
10
Unlimited
Unlimited
1
0
No
Premium
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Yes
Honorable Mentions
The following services also offer email aliasing services, however I find their features to be far inferior to Addy.io and SimpleLogin. Still, if you find that neither of my primary recommendations work for you, you may consider one of these instead.
DuckDuckGo Email Protection
DuckDuckGo Email Protection is a free service offering unlimited aliases, tracker remover, automatic HTTPS upgrades, and more. You can sign-up and manage your aliases from any browser on any OS and even reply to emails you receive, though it doesn’t appear you can start a fresh message from an alias. It should be noted that I have lost nearly all faith in DuckDuckGo, at least as a search engine and a browser. At this time I would be open to considering their email aliasing and data removal offerings, but I would proceed with caution given their track record.
Firefox Relay
Firefox Relay is a freemium serivce. On all plans it will strip email trackers, but you are limited to five aliases on the free plan. On paid plans, you can reply to incoming emails (though you can’t initiate a new conversation) and you are given unlimited aliases. At the Premium tier, Relay also offers a phone number that can you use which forwards to your existing phone number, however I’m told that you can only reply to the latest message you received and thus I wouldn’t recommend it as a Voice-over-IP service. The highest tier also offers a VPN, however it’s simply a repackaged version of Mullvad. The email protection, however, may be a service worth considering.
Getting Started + Tips & Tricks
Like the other tools I have suggested on this site, I encourage you to make the changes one by one. Every time you use a website, take a moment to change your email address to an alias email address. I then encourage you to use your alias email addresses going forward.
The biggest tip I have for using these services is to not use them for critically important accounts such as banking, medical, or other accounts you cannot afford to lose access to (unless you are using the custom domian feature). Email aliasing services are constantly getting blocklisted by companies, or they may go out of business. Have a separate encrypted email account directly with an established provider for use with important services (or, again, preferrably use a custom domain).
With both AnonAddy and SimpleLogin, you can use a custom domain and a “wildcard” (or “create on the fly”) addresses. This can be a great tool for protecting your inbox and compartmentalizing, while still maintaining control of those email addresses. For example, you can add “mydomain.com” to your forwarding (email alias) provider’s account and then create example1@mydomain.com and example2@mydomain.com, etc. So if you’re ever unable to use your alias email provider’s service for any reason, you can just simply redirect that domain to a different provider. Some commonly-recommended domain registrars in the privacy community include 1984hosting, NameCheap, and OrangeWebsite.