I’m getting more spam after using my primary email for online accounts, so I’m looking for a reliable email alias or masking service. Which options offer strong privacy, easy alias management, and dependable email forwarding?
Don’t replace your primary address with a single “junk” address. That address will eventually become another spam magnet. Use a separate alias for every account so you can disable only the address that leaked.
SimpleLogin and addy.io are the strongest general-purpose choices. Both make it easy to create, label, pause, and delete aliases, and they can forward to your existing inbox. Paid plans are more useful if you need custom domains or want to send and reply through an alias. If you already pay for iCloud+, Hide My Email is the easiest Apple option. Fastmail’s Masked Email is another convenient setup, especially with 1Password or Bitwarden, but it makes the most sense if you already want Fastmail as your email provider.
The overlooked issue is portability. A custom domain lets you move your aliases to another provider later, but every address shares the same domain and can potentially be connected to you. Random aliases on a provider’s shared domain offer better separation, though some websites reject known masking domains. Whichever route you choose, keep your real address reserved for banking, government, and critical account recovery, and record each alias in your password manager.
If you need to reply from aliases, test that before committing. Some services forward mail perfectly but make sending awkward, and a bad setup can expose your real address in headers or account settings. @luciddev59 is right about per-site aliases, but I’d prioritize reliable two-way mail and recovery over generating hundreds of throwaway addresses. For newsletters and shopping, aliases are ideal. For banking or anything you cannot afford to lose, use a dedicated permanent address.
No masking service will clean up the spam already hitting your primary address. The useful test is whether creating a fresh alias takes so little effort that you’ll actually do it for every signup.
For a free, low-commitment start, DuckDuckGo Email Protection is fine. It generates private forwarding addresses and removes common email trackers, though the management side is simpler than dedicated alias services. If you expect dozens of accounts, SimpleLogin or addy.io will be less frustrating because they support on-the-fly aliases, proper labeling, and sending through an alias.
The annoyance people often discover later is troubleshooting. Password resets, large attachments, and verification messages can fail or arrive late, and some sites reject masking domains entirely. Before moving anything important, try the service with a shop, newsletter, and forum account. Confirm that replies work, then save the alias beside the login in your password manager.
I’m slightly less strict than @phantom_cyber_socket about never using aliases for important accounts, but I would avoid disposable provider-owned aliases there. A stable address on a domain you control is reasonable if you keep paying for the domain and maintain recovery codes. For everyday accounts, random shared-domain aliases give better separation and are easier to kill when spam starts.
If your goal is only sorting mail and spotting leaks, a paid masking service may be overkill. Plus addressing, such as name+store@yourmail.com, can identify who shared an address. It does not provide real privacy. Your base address remains obvious, and some sites remove or reject the +tag.
For actual masking, use a random alias per account. SimpleLogin and addy.io are the sensible general-purpose picks because they treat aliases as things you may need to search, disable, reply from, and export later. DuckDuckGo is easier if you only want quick forwarding and tracker removal. Apple and Fastmail make sense when you already live in those ecosystems. Switching your whole mail setup just to get their masking feature seems backwards.
I slightly disagree with treating your “real” address as the safest choice for banks and recovery. A dedicated permanent address used only for critical accounts is safer than the same personal address you give friends, employers, stores, and random organizations. It does not need to be a disposable alias. It just needs to stay unpublished and boring.
The hidden failure point is the forwarding chain. Messages can be filtered by the alias provider and then filtered again by your inbox provider. That is why password resets sometimes disappear while newsletters arrive perfectly. Before trusting any service, test incoming mail, replies, attachments, and account recovery. Check whether it has delivery logs, since “the reset never arrived” is much easier to solve when you can see where it stopped.
Whichever service you choose, secure that account more carefully than an average shopping login. Turn on strong two-factor authentication, save recovery codes offline, and keep the destination mailbox current. If you use your own domain, renew it for several years and enable automatic renewal. Losing the domain means losing every address attached to it, which rather defeats the clever alias system.
Don’t funnel every account through a masking service you don’t fully control and then forget that the whole thing sits behind one login. If that account gets locked, closed, or the company gets bought and shut down, every alias pointing to it stops resolving at the same moment. That’s a bigger mess than the spam you started with, because now dozens of logins can’t do password resets. So whatever you pick, the destination inbox and the alias account both need to be rock solid, not an afterthought.
The point @alextheninja made about plus addressing being fake privacy is correct, and it’s worth being blunter about it. Anyone who wants to strip the tag just does it with a regex. Sites do it automatically all the time. It’s a sorting trick, nothing more, and treating it as masking will burn you the first time a data broker normalizes your address back to the base.
Where I’d nudge the thread a little: everyone’s testing forwarding, replies, and attachments, which is right, but the test people skip is what the service does when it decides your traffic looks like abuse. Some of these providers rate limit or suspend accounts that create aliases in bursts or catch a lot of spam, and the appeal process can be slow. If you generate a hundred aliases the week you sign up, you might trip something. Ramp up gradually and you avoid that whole category of pain.
On the free start, DuckDuckGo is genuinely fine for newsletters and shopping like @rapidrunner7584 said, but keep in mind you don’t get a custom domain there, so you’re locked to their setup with no portability. That’s acceptable for throwaway stuff. It’s the wrong place to park anything you’d cry over losing.
My actual take is simpler than most of the thread. Use a service with delivery logs and a custom domain option, put boring critical accounts on a quiet dedicated address that has nothing to do with your alias provider, and don’t overthink the rest. The real work isn’t choosing between SimpleLogin and addy.io, both are fine. It’s making sure that if any single piece dies, you can still recover. Renew the domain years out, save the recovery codes offline, and confirm you actually receive reset emails before you trust the chain with a login you can’t afford to lose.
Create two test aliases and reply through each from the mail app you actually use on your phone and computer. Then inspect the received messages. A masking service can hide the address correctly while your mail client still exposes your real name, profile photo, automatic signature, company details, or contact card. That defeats a surprising amount of the privacy benefit.
SimpleLogin and addy.io are still the sensible shortlist for serious alias management, but I would choose between them based on which one makes reverse-alias replies least confusing in your normal setup. DuckDuckGo’s option is adequate when you mostly receive newsletters and store mail, though its simpler controls become limiting once you have many aliases. Tracker removal is nice, but it matters less than being able to find an alias, see whether mail was delivered, and send without revealing yourself.
I’m skeptical of moving every existing account immediately. Start using aliases for new signups, then migrate old accounts only when they send spam or when you happen to update their security settings. That gets most of the benefit without turning this into a weekend-long email administration project.