What's the best way to use multiple email addresses or aliases without tying myself to a service?

Questions
1

I’ve had Proton Unlimited for the last 3 years with the long term hope of getting my family onto it. However, this is not going to happen unfortunately, and I am spending a lot more money than I would like to on this subscription. We are already paying for Bitwarden, and I found Proton Drive to be extremely unreliable (plus it has no Linux client yet). I am switching to a combo of Mail Plus, Filen, Bitwarden, and I will purchase Mullvad only when I need it.

This 4 part software combo is much cheaper than Proton Unlimited. However, it only allows me a few custom addresses, of which I have many, and Proton does not allow you to delete more than one a year. Plus, I am afraid of somebody trying to send me mail at those addresses and me missing it, especially for various services I signed up for using them. Phone customer service is non-existent these days, so losing access to an email address can be devastating.

I already know this is going to be a brutal process. But I want to prevent it moving forward. Is there some sort of method of multiple addresses or aliasing that would prevent this from happening again? I do have my own domain, but I am unsure if that would solve the problem or what I should do with it. In addition to this, part of the problem is that domain is registered with one of those Proton Mail addresses that I would lose. So I also wouldn’t have access to the domain registrar.

I am hanging on, trying not to go back to my three Gmail addresses at this point to avoid future frustration. Hopefully there is a better solution.

2

That’s what aliasing services (SimpleLogin, Addy, etc.) are for.

Ultimately, any email address you could have is going to rely on at least one external service, be it mail hosting, email aliasing, domain registrar, etc.

3

I probably missed something obvious — why not bind an active email to the domain registrar?

Plus, I am afraid of somebody trying to send me mail at those addresses and me missing it, especially for various services I signed up for using them.

A simple thing to do is search your mail archive to find important senders at those addresses and update your email there. The most important are the services using email for 2fa and the ones u do not have a password for.

Is there some sort of method of multiple addresses or aliasing that would prevent this from happening again?

Two things helped me in a similar situation after realizing SimpleLogin didn’t provide enough value to keep paying for:

  1. I use DuckDuckGo aliases + Cloudflare Email Routing with my domain. DDG is free, backed by one of the most profitable companies in the privacy space, and will probably outlive every other alias service including my own domain. Cloudflare is free and sadly probably outlive myself. My own domain is for sensitive stuff — like, I trust DDG, but passing financial or medical data through a free service feels wrong.

After this switch I’ve changed my main email account several times with no pain — it’s just changing one line in email routing rules.

  1. I created a “main” folder in my password manager for credentials I can’t afford to lose. There are a few hundred accounts in my password manager and I don’t really care about most of them. Knowing the 10–20 accounts (and connected addresses) you actually care about simplifies things a lot.

General rule: you don’t want to create bindings with things you might want to switch without need. Money, political disagreements, and superior alternatives are the main reasons to switch. Choosing free over paid and boring over loud saves us from two of those cases.

4

This sounds like the type of solution I would like to use. I have my Cloudflare email set up with my custom domain. I just need to move the Cloudflare account to a more stable email address, like one of my original Gmail addresses, and then set up some filters there to get rid of the insane amount of spam they send.

I’ve always kept a very tidy email inbox, and now it’s biting me in the rear though…I delete all emails with those one time login requests, etc. I’ll comb through my Bitwarden and see what aliases are attached to to try and protect myself from losing access to anything.

As for DDG, that’s super good information to have. I had never looked into it because the only two options on the main Privacy Guides site are Simple Login and Addy. But then again, it’s also missing Immich, which is a colossal miss, so maybe I should do some more research outside of just this one area. I’ll try to get some stuff set up, and report back to hopefully help other people in my position in the future.

5

And by “they” you mean Cloudflare? I wonder, because the only emails I get from them are monthly invoices. Maybe checking your notification settings could help. You could also subscribe to some Cloudflare product updates: they’re pretty noisy, but from what I see in my inbox, they’re not tied to your main account email.

As for DDG, that’s super good information to have

The thing people usually dislike about it is the lack of a dashboard to control things, which is why combining DDG with Cloudflare or another powerful email filtering tool works well. Proton’s filtering features are among the most advanced, but they require a paid plan and still aren’t as flexible as JavaScript in Cloudflare Email Workers.

Also, since you’re planning to use Bitwarden — it can create DDG aliases.

6

You can set up your domain on Purelymail and configure it to forward from any address on that domain to a real account you set up. It’s super cheap and easy. Then you can make up whatever email address you want to give to a service on the fly and it’ll work. The downside is you can’t track those aliases automatically.

7

And by “they” you mean Cloudflare? I wonder, because the only emails I get from them are monthly invoices.

Yes. It has been going down over time, but there seems to often be a new “category” that I miss. I went through their system in the dashboard and unsubscribed from everything instead of relying on the unsubscribe buttons on each individual email. We will see if that helps.

The thing people usually dislike about it is the lack of a dashboard to control things, which is why combining DDG with Cloudflare or another powerful email filtering tool works well.

Would you mind elaborating a bit more on this? I went ahead and followed their steps. It had me install the DDG protection extension (which is forcing me to use DDG as my search engine, which is SUPER uncool), and then I created an @duck.com address (which is a super cute domain name, way more fun than simplelogin and passmail).

But you are right, it is weirder to manage than Simple Login. I cannot see my list of aliases anywhere from the looks of it. Which also means, I cannot disable them, which for me, sort of defeats the purpose of aliases. I want to be able to shut one off if a website decides to go rogue and start spamming me with no way to unsubscribe. This has saved me several times before with Simple Login. With the Cloudflare combo, which I have, is there something I’m missing that allows for a better technique here?

8

Imo, if you want to avoid that just have as many throaway email accounts as you need and manage them in a password manager.

9

That is how I used to do it in the past. I had three Gmail accounts, one for personal use, one for services, and one for items that I thought were going to be spam-ridden. Now, they have protections against signing up for a bunch of Gmail accounts, birthday verification, etc.

I could technically create a bunch of email addresses at my domain name, but Proton Mail Plus limits me to 10 email addresses. Plus, my domain is a catch-all for emails sent to that domain name. So there’s not a way to “turn off” an alias, like I currently do with Simple Login.

10

This could help

11

Would you mind elaborating a bit more on this?

I’ll try.

It had me install the DDG protection extension (which is forcing me to use DDG as my search engine, which is SUPER uncool), and then I created an @duck.com address (which is a super cute domain name, way more fun than simplelogin and passmail).

No need to keep it installed once you configure Bitwarden or another way to access the API. The first address you got is, as you said, a cute thing — but it’s not disposable. Mostly you’ll use generated private addresses (via extension → Generate Private Duck Address, or through Bitwarden).

I cannot see my list of aliases anywhere

Right, it doesn’t exist.

Which also means, I cannot disable them

That’s actually a nice thing about DDG: it adds a button to disable the address at the top of every forwarded email. That makes it possible to disable an alias from any email client without switching to a dashboard. This, along with tracker removal from forwarded emails, are DDG’s main features.

With the Cloudflare combo, which I have, is there something I’m missing that allows for a better technique here?

Depends on what you need and how much you want to build around the basics. For example:

My main issue with DDG aliases was filtering. With regular email I could add +forum to an address and have one filter for all forum emails. SimpleLogin is a bit different but similar. With DDG you have a unique recipient and sender per alias, so the simplest way to filter is awkward: you’d have to edit filters after every new alias adding.

What I do instead: I create aliases via a shell script with a passed category (e.g. forums), launched by Alfred or Espanso. It 1) pastes the generated address into the current input field and 2) records the alias address and category into Cloudflare storage.

Received emails go through a Cloudflare Email Worker with some basic logic: it checks the alias against the stored categories and either forwards to the right inbox, sends me a Telegram message for urgent categories, or parses the email content for keywords and decides from there. It gets boring after that, but hopefully it works as an example.

A lot of people just create DDG aliases in bitwarden and consider password manager db as a list of aliases.

12

Sounds good. Thank you for all the feedback. I tested it out, and I think the DDG aliases will work well for most things. There is a substantial delay from when I send the test email to when I receive it, so I will probably not use it for anything that will rely on sending 2FA codes to it. But you are right, having the deactivate button right there is WAY better than having to go somewhere to deactivate it. Bitwarden will show me everything I have, since I will be using it to generate it.

I appreciate all the help! I’m still working with Proton Customer Support to find out what happens to the other addresses when I downgrade.

13

I hate the services with this kinds of limits. AFAIK, there’s literally no difference for them between serving 10 or 10,000 addresses.

If we are talking about the same domain served by Cloudflare, create a subdomain like mail.example.com on Cloudflare and add a catch-all rule on the Routing rules tab of the Email Routing dashboard. Or create specific addresses on the same tab. That’s it — no limit on the number of addresses.

It’s for incoming mail only though — for sending you need a paid Cloudflare plan or a service like smtp2go, resend.com, etc.

BTW, back to DDG: people often miss that you can send from any alias. It’s not obvious without a dashboard and until you read the docs:

14

Yup, that’s exactly what I started doing! As emails came in to my aliases throughout the day, I changed them to their service name and then my domain, such as privacyguides@mydomain .com, which is pretty handy.

And I have another 15 months before my Unlimited subscription is up for renewal. Hopefully I can catch every single alias and address in that period of time and get things all squared away.

15

Circling back around to this, I am stunned at how many services do not allow you to change your email address. This is actually going to be way more brutal than I thought. I’m going to lose a ton of data from the addresses that Proton has me locked into.

Lesson learned I guess.