How to hide your email address

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We found an interesting article on the It's blog FOSS called 5 Tools to Protect Your Email Address From Websites and Newsletters, or 5 ways to hide your email address. Since it seemed like an excellent idea to us, we decided to offer you something similar, so it won't be a translation of that article but our reinterpretation! How to hide your email address?

We have already addressed this topic in two different articles: one dedicated entirely to addy.io while the other dedicated to temporary emails.

What we want to address today is a similar problem: how can we register for newsletters, sites and all those places where we are asked for an email, without letting everyone know our real email address?

The concept is simple, even if it can take a while to understand: in practice you always receive emails at the same address but you create different email addresses ad hoc to give to the various sites that ask you. The image below, taken from SimpleLogin, seems quite explanatory to us.

How to hide your email address

So what happens: thanks to one of the systems we are going to list, you can register on the various sites using email addresses different from yours. As already explained in the article on addy.io, we know that many providers, including Gmail for example, allow the creation of infinite aliases simply by inserting the '+' after your username. This practice, however, is not entirely safe because:

• your email address is exposed and easily circumvented by any ad hoc script: in fact, it will be enough to eliminate everything that comes after '+' to automatically trace your real email address;

• it is rarely possible to reply from the alias created and this, on some occasions, can be a problem.

Bitwarden integration

Some of these applications are integrated within Bitwarden ¹. In fact, it is possible to integrate your accounts from your Bitwarden account SimpleLogin, addy.io or Firefox Relay. This way, every time you have to sign up for a new service you can choose an absolutely random username and password and store them directly in Bitwarden with minimal effort!

Catch-all with custom domain

We're throwing it out there as a suggestion for anyone who wants to look around a bit and tinker around a bit. As an alternative to an email alias service you could consider using your own custom domain and enabling catch-all. Catch-all is a method, which is not offered by all providers so check first, which allows you to receive any email at your domain. Basically you could create your own @xxx.it domain, enable catch-all and then just give any email address with that domain to receive the email. You will always receive them all, no matter what.

This service has some advantages such as the fact that emails do not have to go through a second provider (which is inevitable when talking about services that forward emails to you). The bad thing is that for example it is not guaranteed that you can reply from any address: these are settings that you will have to look at individually in the various providers!

However, as mentioned, this is a slightly more complex choice. We are also evaluating whether to make an ad hoc article for custom domains. In the meantime, we hope we have aroused your curiosity and, as always, we let each or every one of you decide how far you want to go.

Here are our picks

We therefore offer you some tools that are simple to use and truly within anyone's reach. In this article we will only talk about email aliases and not about temporary email addresses as in this other article.

SimpleLogin

Open source
also in free version
You can use your own domain
integration with Bitwarden
you can use PGP
security audits
official applications for Android and iOS

After the acquisition by Proton ² has passed a major independent safety audit ³ and it has undoubtedly become one of the most interesting companies on the market. The Premium subscription costs 30$ per year but if you are already registered with Proton it is already included in your paid subscription.

In the paid version it is possible to have infinite aliases and infinite personal domains. The domains that can be used in the paid version are a little different than in the free version. At the time of writing, in fact, the free ones appear to be simplelogin.com, aleeas.com, slmail.me and simplelogin.fr while paid users can also use 8alias.com, dralias.com and 8shield.net. Using a paid domain should be better because it is less likely to be blocked or used for some abuse.

addy.io (ex AnonAddy)

Open source
also in free version
You can use your own domain
integration with Bitwarden
you can use PGP
Unofficial Android and iOS applications

It is certainly the most interesting service together with SimpleLogin. It has existed for several years and has rarely had any outages. It is run by just one person, Will Browning ⁴, who explained well what would happen if he died: What happens to addy.io if you die?

It is definitely a great option, it is intuitive and in the paid version it has many domains you can use. It also has two different types of registration, in addition to the free one: quarrel or pro. In the version quarrel, which costs 12$ per year, you still have some limits including that of the bandwidth used and the messages that can be sent from the aliases. In the pro version however, at a cost of 36$ per year, almost all the limits disappear or become very high and difficult to overcome.

Firefox Relay

Open source
also in free version
integration with Bitwarden
no smartphone application

Not long ago Mozilla also entered the magical world of email aliases. Through its Firefox Relay service, integrated into your Firefox account. It offers a very basic free version but its premium service is absolutely cheap: it costs less than €1 per month.

Unlike the previous ones, it has many fewer options available, probably also due to its young age, however it has other very interesting ones such as the automatic blocking of advertising emails. The free domain is mozmail.com and in the paid version you can have others. It is perhaps the best compromise for those who want to spend little and need a simple and effective service.

Proton Pass

10 free aliases
official applications for Android and iOS

Proton's new product for manage passwords, called Proton Pass, also includes and integrates an alias creation service to hide your email address. There are only 10 aliases for those who use it in the free version while they are unlimited for those who have the paid version ⁵.

DuckDuckGo Email Protection

totally free
official applications for Android and iOS

Even the most famous duck on the web has entered this market. In mid-2022 it came out of beta and opened membership to anyone ⁶. To sign up it is mandatory to have their application or, on desktop, use their extension.

There is no paid version and, for now, everything is offered for free. It is not possible to create many aliases but only one to use for all the sites where you want to register. The domain is the beautiful @duck.com. Emails forwarded to your address will be cleaned of any tracking pixels or statistics.

Definitely excellent to use for registering for newsletters or unimportant sites.

More alternatives to hide your email address

• Surfshark Alternative ID, with a Surfshark subscription it is possible to obtain real alternative identities (complete with fake name, surname, date and place of birth, therefore not just email). However as you know we do not recommend using Surfshark as a VPN but it seems correct to point out this possibility if you already have a Surfshark subscription.

1. Add Privacy and Security Using Email Aliases With Bitwarden[↩]
2. SimpleLogin joins the Proton family[↩]
3. SimpleLogin passes an independent security audit[↩]
4. Who's behind addy.io?[↩]
5. Proton Pass Alias[↩]
6. Protect Your Inbox: DuckDuckGo Email Protection Beta Now Open to All![↩]

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