Nearly every privacy recommendation costs you something daily and pays you back rarely. Aliases are the exception: the work is a few seconds at signup, and the payoff compounds for as long as you keep the habit.
What an alias actually is
An alias is a real, working email address that delivers into your existing mailbox. Mail sent to shop-a1b2@yourdomain.com arrives in the same inbox as mail to your normal address. You did not create a second account, and you do not check it separately.
The point is that the alias is disposable and attributable. It belongs to exactly one relationship — one shop, one newsletter, one landlord — so it carries information your main address cannot: where mail came from, and who is responsible when it goes wrong.
How it differs from the alternatives
- Plus-addressing (
you+shop@gmail.com) is free and instant, but the real address is right there in the string. Any list broker who cares strips everything after the+, and plenty of signup forms reject the character outright. Useful for sorting; close to useless for privacy. - A separate junk mailbox works, but you have to actually check it, and everything in it shares one address — so you still cannot tell who leaked you.
- Forwarding services do the job well, at the cost of a third party in the path of your mail and a subscription to another company. If your goal is fewer companies holding your data, adding one is an odd move.
- Aliases at your provider keep the mail on one system, reveal nothing about your real address, and can be switched off individually.
The rule that makes it work
One alias per relationship, named after the relationship. Not shopping@ for all shops — alias-for-that-one-shop@. The instant you have a shared alias, you have lost the ability to attribute a leak, which is the entire benefit.
Once that habit is in place, three useful things follow:
- Spam becomes evidence. Junk arriving at an alias you gave to exactly one company is proof of what that company did with your address — sold it, or lost it in a breach. There is no ambiguity to argue about.
- The fix is one switch. Disable that alias. The spam stops permanently, and nothing else in your life changes. Compare that to the alternative: changing your real address, and telling everyone.
- Phishing gets easy to spot. A "your bank" email arriving at the alias you only ever gave your electricity supplier is definitively fake, before you have read a word of it.
The two mistakes
Using an alias for account recovery you cannot afford to lose. If you disable an alias later and it was your bank's only route to you, you have locked yourself out. Keep recovery addresses stable and boring.
Making them guessable. amazon@yourdomain.com is trivially enumerated by anyone who knows your domain. Include something random.
Custom domains make it permanent
Aliases on a provider's domain are tied to that provider. On your own domain, they are yours — the addresses survive changing providers entirely, which turns the biggest reason people stay somewhere they dislike into a non-issue. If you are going to build the habit, building it on a domain you control is the version that lasts.
Mailotte gives you 3 aliases on Free, 10 on Zen, and unlimited aliases plus custom domains on Haven; Shield also blocks the tracking pixels that arrive on them.