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, or you can use your email address instead of a username at login) 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.
Listed in alphabetical order, not order of recommendation
Pros
Discounts to other services available through their partnerships
Cons
- None
Use Cases
Best for people who use Proton but want to compartmentalize services
Best for people on a budget who don’t send or receive many emails (Lite plan)
Pros
Included in Proton’s Unlimited or higher plans
Integrates with Proton Pass
Can be purchased as a standalone product if you’d prefer
Cons
- None
Use Cases
Best for people who use Proton and prefer to bundle or like ecosystems
Best for people on a budget who do send or receive lots emails
Honorable Mentions
The following services also offer email aliasing services, however I find their features to be far inferior to Addy.io, SimpleLogin, and MailX. Still, if you find that neither of my primary recommendations work for you, you may consider one of these instead.
AdGuard Mail
AdGuard Mail is a new offering from highly-reputed ad-blocking service AdGuard. AdGuard Mail is still early in development and the free tier is likely missing a lot of features that would make it usable in the manner I recommend using email aliasing, however the Full plan is affordable and new features are being added regularly.
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 (except mobile, where you’ll need to use their browser) 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 am cautiously recommending their email aliasing and data removal offerings.
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.
Getting Started + Tips & Tricks
I strongly encourage the use of custom email domains. This is the strongest way to ensure control over your email address, regardless of what happens to your provider or your account with them. A custom domain is incredibly cheap - usually anywhere from $10-25 USD per year depending on the domain - and your email provider should offer instructions and assistance in how to set it up to be used with your email address. If anything ever happens to your account or provider, you can simply point the domain to a new provider of your choice and continue to receive emails like normal. Some domain registrars we recommend include 1984hosting, NameCheap, and OrangeWebsite. Please note that both email aliasing services we recommend require a paid account to use a custom domain, and some of the Honorable Mentions lack this feature entirely.
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.
With some of these providers, you can use “wildcard” (or “create on the fly”) email addresses. This can be a great tool for when you’re caught off guard with a request for an email address and have to come up with one on the spot. Simply make up an email address with a domain in your account (custom or otherwise, so long as the service supports the functionality) and it will automatically be created as soon as someone emails you.