Every afternoon, I enjoy a short walk to get my beloved mail. Thank you notes, invitations, catalogs…getting a piece of mail sent to you by your favorite company or friend is the best.
Yet, 90% of mail these days is annoying marketing material, scams or political clutter.
My email address is pretty much the same! While I can’t block physical flotsam from my mailbox, I can block annoying senders with email aliases.
What’s an email alias?
An email alias is a simple forwarding email address that you can give to people or companies instead of your actual email address.
- Mail sent to the alias will be forwarded to your real email address
- If you no longer want that alias to receive mail, you can simply remove it and the person or organization will not be able to continue sending you mail
SimpleLogin is an awesome, open-source product for generating email aliases. Proton recently purchased SimpleLogin in 2022, and the two companies have similar open-source, security focused policies. Here are some of the great capabilities exposed by SimpleLogin’s email alias service.
- Generous Pricing ($30 a year) — Infinite forwards/sends/aliases, unlimited bandwidth
- Custom domains — Bring your own domain and use a catch-all alias
- Manage Everywhere — Generate aliases on your phone or computer
- Privacy and Security — Protect emails sent to your mailbox with PGP
- Send emails from alias — Take your mailbox protection one step further by responding to emails with your alias! Communicate with customer service associates without exposing your real mailbox
- Deactivate senders or aliases — Turn of the ability for individual senders or the entire alias at any time!
How do I get started?
- Sign up with SimpleLogin.io — Use your Proton account if you want!
SimpleLogin is a freemium model. If you want to try out their service for free, you can. However, the paid service is relatively cheap. Quite a few features require their premium subscription.
- Get started with SimpleLogin using their nice documentation
Play around with SimpleLogin but make sure to do the basics like…
- Setup your first mailbox
- Create an alias or two
- Send a few emails to one of your aliases and see how the email looks in your real mailbox
- Buy or bring your own domain!
If you do not already own a domain, this section will help you navigate that by using namecheap.com. If you already own a domain, skip to step 4.
3a. Create an account on namecheap.com
3b. Pick a domain! Checkout Google’s advice
3c. Buy the domain!
Namecheap is pretty straightforward. Once you decide on your domain, follow the easy-to-use site to buy your domain.
- Connect your custom domain to SimpleLogin!
Enter your new domain and follow the steps on SimpleLogin’s site for Namecheap registration.
- Configure your default alias settings
Setup how email aliases are generated by default, the default domain name for aliases and the default suffix generator for aliases here
Extra Fun
At this point, you’ll be able to create email aliases with your custom subdomain! If you want, you can stop here. BUT, there are a few ease of use features you may want to take advantage of.
Configure a catch-all rule
Configure a catch-all rule to make on-the-fly email alias generation easy! Check the toggle when looking at your custom domain configurations. This will allow you to give anyone a custom alias immediately. Think “gap@mycustomdomain.com” or “coffee@mycustomdomain.com”. These aliases will work without taking any action with SimpleLogin once you configure a catch all rule. SimpleLogin will then record these new aliases once used and allow you to manage them just like aliases you manually create.
Configure username generation with your Password Manager
If (hopefully!) you are using a password generator, your pwd generator may allow you to hook up your SimpleLogin account to generate usernames when creating credentials in your password generator. I use Bitwarden as my password manager. Read more about the feature here