What service or strategy do you use for e-mail aliasing? And what was the primary reason you chose it over alternative?

  • Addy
  • Simplelogin (as part of a Proton subscription)
  • Simplelogin (independent of a Proton subscription)
  • Duckduckgo E-mail Protection
  • Firefox Relay
  • iCloud+ Hide My E-mail
  • 33mail
  • The real OG aliasing service and Grandaddy of them all.
  • Forward E-Mail
  • Another aliasing service (or multiple aliasing services)
  • Something else (plus addressing, catch all, aliases built in to your email provider)
0 voters

Everyone sure likes creating these public polls where you can see who voted for what, even though we went out of our way to disable that by default :sweat_smile:

7 Likes

Definitely true in my case :smile: I enjoy seeing who uses what in a small focused community like thisā€¦ Buuuut I think I still get to blame you for this preference of mine partially :smile: (possibly?). Iā€™m only joking, but I became accustomed to this style of poll, and then got to like it, because of the Techlore forum.

Personally I donā€™t really see public polls like this as much of a privacy concern for myself (apart from certain topics where Iā€™d just refrain from answering it) since much of the discussion on the PG forum already revolves around discussing what we use and how we use it, in much more detail than a poll will usually capture. And because I consider my participation here to be ā€˜publicā€™. But I can think of reasons why others, with different priorities or threat models might prefer not to have their answers public.

In the case of this specific poll, it is a multiple choice poll, in that context, I think results are much more meaningful when you see who voted for what (since 10 people selecting one option or 1 person selecting 10 options would be reported the same if you canā€™t see how many options individuals chose.

4 Likes

I am just waiting for @forwardemail to implement encryption of aliases for free plans. (Donā€™t mind paying but its about the principles haha)

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You mean Proton Pass right ?

1 Like

I have a tiny amount of aliases via my webhosting provider, otherwise I have both SL Premium and Addy Pro right now. Iā€™m going to downgrade one of them, just not sure which one. I think I like the UI of Addy a little better, while the features are very similar.

1 Like

I was thinking of Proton Unlimited, but I suppose Proton Pass subscribers would be included in that category also

Using Tuta with catch-all custom domains, one public for accounts tied to my identity and one anonymous for accounts that are not, with Bitwarden generating the handles for each account.

While an aliasing service would possibly be a smoother solution, the added risk and cost of an additional middleman is not worth it for my needs.

And a few other garbage emails for accounts I really donā€™t care about.

Considering this. Do you have spam that comes through on nonsense aliases that were not generated by yourself?

In my case, no. (I donā€™t use catch-all, but I use one service that is functionally equivalent in the sense that aliases can be generated on the fly by anyone who knows how in a way that makes it somewhat similarly vulnerable to spam from randoms). Iā€™ve used that service for about 10 years and Iā€™ve never received spam to an address that I didnā€™t create myself. However, the format is a bit more complex than a catchall so a spammer would need to know the format:

literally_anything[dot]some_number[dot]username@domain.tld

1 Like

Not really. Iā€™ve had this set-up for 1-2 years now and so far Iā€™ve only received 1 spam email ā€” which might just be a mistake since the handle is some womanā€™s Firstname.Lastname@domain.xxx. So itā€™s possibly zero at this point.

Related to this Iā€™m low- key trying to convince Tuta to implement a filter function to block all emails not whitelisted ā€” i.e. enable catch-all, block all, except the addresses I make. No idea how hard it would be to impement but it would make me very happy.

This is the best wayyyyyyy.

SimpleLogin, independent of Proton subscription (though I have been creating aliases within Proton Pass I suppose, with a separate Pass Plus subscription linked to my SL account).

Addy and SL are the best options in my mind, but it just came down to starting with SL a few years ago because of the student discount (sadly I was a few months late to the lifetime free student account, though I donā€™t mind paying for a service I get so much use out of). Now, having SL support within Proton Pass is very nice, after having switched from Bitwarden for UI/UX reasons.

Because of the discount, I would still make the same choice of SL over addy today. However, if pricing wasnā€™t a concern, I would probably enjoy addy more because of the far nicer UI/UX (especially on mobile), though still likely end up stuck with SL for Proton Pass integration since I donā€™t want to go back to Bitwarden haha.

1 Like

:tada: Weā€™ve released encryption of aliases for free plans!

See the post here https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/forward-email-email-provider/13370/125 for more info!

2 Likes

QUESTION FOR EVERYONE:

Is it a bad strategy to use e-mail aliases for frequent correspondence?

Ever since I signed up to Proton Mail, Iā€™ve avoided sharing my Proton addresses with anyone who uses a Big Tech email providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etcā€¦ That means not sharing my Proton addresses with friends, family, and occasionally businesses.

My Rule: If I have the choice between exposing my Proton address to send non-encrypted emails versus using an alias to send non-encrypted e-mails, Iā€™d rather do the latter.

Is that a bad idea for people I have to exchange with regularly?

E.g.: Suppose my sisters and I hire a lawyer to sue a company over a family matter.

Although our lawyer has a professional privately owned e-mail (lawyer@lawfirm.com), and I have a Proton address, my sisters both have Gmail addresses.

So because I want to avoid any of my Proton addresses to be exposed on Googleā€™s servers via my sisters, I give our lawyer and my sisters an alias instead (username@passinbox.com).

Knowing that there are going to be group e-mails through which we regularly correspond with our lawyer as a family, creating long email threads (15+), is it impractical to use an alias?

Is it bad to use an alias if one wants to keep records of emails? Are there any downsides to this strategy vs using a Proton address?

Keep in mind, in both cases, the emails are not E2EE.