Stop Giving Your Real Email to Every Website. Here Is What to Use Instead.
Think about how many times you have typed your email address into a website this year. A store checkout. A free download. A coupon pop-up. A webinar sign-up. A Wi-Fi login at the airport.
Each one of those sites now holds a copy of your real address. Some will send you more mail than you asked for. Some will share it with partners. And some will eventually get hacked.
Privacy-minded people have used a simple fix for years: email aliases. An alias lets you sign up for things without ever handing over your real address. This guide explains how they work, which tools to use, and how to set them up in a few minutes.
Why your real email address is worth protecting
Your email address is more than a mailbox. It is the username for your bank, cloud storage, shopping accounts, and social media. It is also where every password reset goes.
That makes it valuable to three groups of people:
Marketers, who want to fill your inbox with offers.
Data brokers, who link your address across sites to build a profile of what you buy, read, and do.
Scammers, who use leaked addresses to send convincing fake emails and to try your address on other sites.
When one address is used everywhere, one leak exposes it all. That is the problem aliases solve.
What is an email alias?
An email alias is a separate address that forwards mail to your real inbox. You give the alias to a website. The website emails the alias. The message lands in your normal inbox, but the website never learns your real address.
The best part: if an alias starts getting spam, you simply turn it off. Nothing else in your life is affected. And because each site gets its own alias, you can see exactly which company leaked or sold your address.
Email alias vs. disposable email: which one do you need?
People often mix these up, but they do different jobs.
An alias lasts as long as you want. Use it for accounts you plan to keep, like a store you shop at often or a newsletter you enjoy.
A disposable (throwaway) address lasts minutes or hours. Use it for one-time things, like downloading a single guide or getting past a sign-up wall.
A word of caution: never use a throwaway address for an account you need to keep. If you lose access to it, you cannot reset your password.
The best tools for creating email aliases
You may already have one of these and not know it.
Apple Hide My Email. Built into iCloud+ on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It can create a random address for you right inside the Sign in with Apple screen or Safari.
Firefox Relay. From Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser. It has a free tier and a browser add-on that fills in an alias for you.
DuckDuckGo Email Protection. Free. It also strips many email trackers from forwarded messages.
SimpleLogin. Owned by Proton, the privacy company. Strong features, and it works with any email provider.
Addy.io (formerly AnonAddy). Open-source, with a free tier, and good for creating aliases on the fly.
Fastmail Masked Email. Built-in if you already use Fastmail, and it works with the 1Password password manager.
Your own domain. If you own a domain name, you can create addresses like shopping@yourname.com that all forward to one inbox.
What about the Gmail "plus" trick? Gmail lets you add a plus sign and a word to your address, like yourname+shopping@gmail.com. It is free and handy for sorting mail. But it is not private. Anyone can delete the "+shopping" part and see your real address. Use it for organizing, not for hiding.
How to set up an email alias system in 5 steps
Pick one alias tool. If you use an iPhone and already pay for iCloud storage, start with Hide My Email. Otherwise, pick one of the free tools above. One tool is easier to manage than three.
Decide who gets your real address. Keep it for family, friends, your doctor, your bank, your employer, and government accounts. These are the places where you need reliable, long-term access.
Use a new alias for every new sign-up. Use a separate alias for stores, newsletters, apps, contests, and free trials. Name it after the site so you remember where it went.
Switch your busiest accounts over. Start with the sites that send you the most mail. Log in, go to account settings, and change the email address to a new alias.
Turn off any alias that turns noisy. If one starts getting spam, disable it. You will also know which company leaked it.
More tips to keep your inbox private
Use a password manager. It remembers which alias goes with which site, along with a strong, unique password for each one.
Turn on two-step verification for your main email account. Even if someone learns your password, they cannot get in without the second code.
Do not post your real email in public. Spam bots scrape comment sections, forums, and public social profiles.
Check whether your email has been in a data breach. The free site Have I Been Pwned will tell you. If it has, change the passwords on those accounts.
Unsubscribe, then delete old accounts. Every account you no longer use is one more place your data can leak from.
Be careful with "Sign in with Google" or "Sign in with Facebook." They are convenient, but they share your real address unless you choose a hide option.
Want help taking back your inbox?
Setting up aliases is easy. Moving years of accounts over, cleaning out an overflowing inbox, and building a system you will actually keep using is the harder part.
That is what Tidy Haus does. For more than 10 years, our digital organizers have helped over 2,100 clients get their email, files, and digital lives under control, all over Zoom. We can help you choose the right privacy tools, switch your accounts to aliases, clean up your inbox, and set up a simple system that keeps your real address private going forward.
Book your free discovery call, and we will talk through how we can help you stay private online.
