Question 1

What is an email alias?

Accepted Answer

An email alias is an alternative address that delivers mail to your real inbox without revealing it. Instead of giving every shop, app, and newsletter your primary address, you give each one its own alias. Mail sent to the alias forwards to you as normal, but the sender never learns your actual email. Because each alias is separate, you can turn one off without affecting the others — so a single address that starts getting spam can be retired in seconds while everything else keeps working.

Question 2

Alias vs. temporary email vs. a second account — which should I use?

Accepted Answer

A temporary email is throwaway: great for one-off signups you’ll never revisit, but it disappears. A second email account gives you permanence but means managing another inbox, password, and login. An alias is the middle path: permanent like a real account, but it forwards into your existing inbox so there’s nothing extra to check, and disposable like a temp address because you can kill any single alias on demand. For accounts you want to keep but not expose, an alias is usually the best fit.

Question 3

How do aliases stop spam and data-broker tracking?

Accepted Answer

When every service has its own alias, your real address is never in circulation, so it can’t be harvested, sold, or added to spam lists. If one company leaks or sells your address, only that alias is affected — and the leak is traceable, because you know exactly which alias received the spam. You simply disable that alias and the spam stops at the door, without changing your real email or any of your other signups. This breaks the data-broker model of correlating you by a single shared address.

Question 4

How does forwarding work on Pro?

Accepted Answer

On the free tier this tool generates alias ideas — useful naming patterns — but they don’t route anywhere yet. With Pro, each alias becomes a live address on your account: mail sent to it is received on our servers and forwarded to your private inbox, so you read everything in one place. You can create aliases on demand (including on a custom domain), see which one received a message, and toggle any of them on or off whenever you like.

Question 5

Can aliases be turned off individually?

Accepted Answer

Yes — that’s the core benefit. With working Pro aliases, each address is independent, so if one starts receiving spam or you no longer trust the service you gave it to, you disable just that alias. Mail to it stops forwarding immediately while every other alias continues to work and your real inbox is untouched. It’s a clean kill switch per relationship, which is far less disruptive than changing your primary email address.

Question 6

Are aliases anonymous?

Accepted Answer

Aliases hide your real address from the services you use, which is a strong privacy improvement, but they’re not full anonymity: the alias still forwards to an inbox you control, and you’re bound by each provider’s terms. They’re designed to compartmentalise your identity and stop cross-service tracking, not to conceal who you are from a determined legal investigation. For genuinely throwaway, unconnected interactions, combine an alias strategy with a temporary email for the truly disposable signups.

Email Alias Generator — Protect Your Real Address

Make these aliases real.

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