My ultimate (free) email aliasing set up

Questions
1

Different services have different pros and cons for their free tiers. I find that using a combination of these free services works best, and you can ultimately derive everything you need from mix and matching.

Proton Pass / Simple Login: great for generating more real looking, legitimate addresses. For example, “absolute.backspin@passinbox.com” looks more legitimate than ag57kf8@anonaddy.com or “tradition-disengage-detection@duck.com”. Limited to 10 free, able to send as reply for free, unable to send as an initiation for free.

Addy.io - best all rounder IMO. Unlimited free aliases, 10mb bandwidth per month. Replying not really an option from the free tier. Up to 10 shared domains (anonaddy.com/me) can be activated at the same time. Unlimited subdomains of yourusername.anonaddy.com/me) can be activated at the same time. And if you did want to pay to unlock the good features, 12 GBP / month is a bargain.

Duckduckgo - something I’ve recently added, and it’s a gamechanger. Unlimited bandwitch and alias creation. Able to reply AND initiate an email for free (though you must manually create the address to send and initiate - from their site “If your alias is john.doe@duck.com and you wish to send an email to jane.doe@example.com, you can do so by sending an email from your forwarding address to jane.doe_at_example.com_john.doe@duck.com”.

Now, I like to use PP for things that I expect a real person to look at and I want a reply from, as if someone gets something from “randomly-generated-email@duck.com” they may not respond as it looks off. The PP emails are great for this, and you can reply as well. This is perfect for web forms.

AA is awesome for creating long term accounts that you intend to use on an ongoing basis. For things that you don’t want to necessarily be anonymous but you want spam control, the subdomains are great and unlimited. The shared domains are best to use for accounts that aren’t tied to you in any formal way. I turn all these off pretty much immediately as well. I don’t need emails coming in from 99% of the things I use anyway, so most of my aliases are turned off. I just turn them on when I need a login link sent to my email or something. Example of this include: mozilla account, reddit, AI services.

Duckduckgo - has been a hugely powerful recent addition. This is the only free service I can think of that allows you to send emails as an initiation, which is just amazing. Furthermore, since the bandwidth and alias creation is unlimited, you can use this as a quick burner, rather than something you’d like to keep long-term. Why not use this all the time? Personally I don’t like that there isn’t a webpage to manage your aliases, and that you need their browser or extension to use it. If you deactivate an alias, I’m not even sure there’s a way to switch it back on? Just not as feature rich.

Just my two cents on my aliasing set up, keen to hear if you have any thoughts, and what your daily drivers are. Particularly if you manage to get away on only free tiers. I think it’s also handy to have different options available, incase a service is blocking domains of another provider. So far with these 3, I’ve not been able to find a service I can’t use aliases on.

2

There’s one thing that’s been bothering me and this thread feels like a good place to say it.

What always stopped me from using Addy.io is that it’s a one-man project. Will Browning is clearly a great dev who deserves respect for a great open-source app. But when there’s a team or company behind a service, it adds some protection against things that can go wrong with a single person. At least there’s someone to say “that’s a bad idea” or to go public when some decision gets made.

Like, I can’t actually guarantee that I myself won’t go crazy one day and do something in colors.js style. Or be forced to do something insecure, things happen.

I genuinely don’t understand how this can be handled. With apps you can fork and review the code to some extent, use your own build. With services it doesn’t work that way. You can self-host Addy, but that doesn’t make much sense for me, there are simpler ways to handle aliases with your own domain and server.

That’s why I use DDG instead, while feeling a bit sad about Addy.io and checking in from time to time to see if there’s something new to learn, just not to actually use it.

3

The developer has addressed the concerns of being a 1 person service here. But the concerns you have are perfectly valid. Frequently Asked Questions - FAQ - addy.io

4

I also like Aliasvault from @lanedirt, it is a one man show though as well. Currently you cannot reply or initiate emails, only receive, but it is on the roadmap and the developer is very open to any input and suggestions.