How To Hide Your Email Address

Your email address is a very valuable asset for you,. Using it, criminals and fraudsters can launch phishing attacks against you and impersonate friends, family, and acquaintances to trick them. It's good practice to keep your email address private from anyone who doesn't necessarily need to know it.

So how to keep your email address hidden from scammers and spammers?

Who needs to know your email address?

You log into your bank account with your email address and give it to sites that require it to create an account or complete verification. Your friends and family can contact you via email and it is inextricably linked to your purchases on Amazon and eBay.

In reality, none of these organizations or individuals need to know your email address, so you need to know how to keep it private.

1. Use a temporary email address to register

Once upon a time, it was easy to navigate the internet with a measure of anonymity. Readers could flit from site to site, devouring news and blogs and caring only about pop-ups, pop-unders, and predatory browser add-ons.

The situation is different now: advertising is more ubiquitous than harmful, and almost every site seems to require you to have an account to view content. While the BBC news site will only pester readers to create an account, the Independent, for example, will require you to create one and prevent you from reading more than a few lines until you do. This of course requires you to provide an email address.

By giving out your email address to any site that asks for it, you greatly increase the chance that your email address will be stolen, sold, or otherwise misused. In these cases, a temporary box is ideal. Simply visit the provider and you will receive an email address that you can later use to register on sites that require an email address. Verification emails will be sent to a temporary email address and deleted after a few hours.

The downside is that the mailbox is often completely public and you can't send emails from a temporary email provider. This is a great solution for quick one-off sign-ups and allows you to keep your email to yourself.

2. Plus Aliasing

One of the built-in features of an email that you may not be aware of is that if you put a + after the first part of your email address with a string of text after the +, both the + and the text will be ignored. The email will be delivered as if it wasn't there.

This means that if your email address is "ezekialsaunders1969@gmail.com", you will receive an email with the address "ezekialsaunders1969+baitandtackle@gmail.com".

You can give out aliased plus emails anywhere, which requires you to give them your email address. And by adding the name of the person or organization you gave your email address to, you'll know who to blame when it inevitably gets leaked.

Aliasing naturally masks your email address. It's easy to find out the real email addresses simply by removing the + and the following string.

 3. Catch-All Forwarding

Custom email domains are great and allow you to express your personality. They also allow you to create and use as many email addresses as you need on the fly - if you only want to receive emails, not send them.

First, choose and buy a domain name. This doesn't have to be expensive - domain names can be had for a few dollars.

To set up Universal Forwarding, go to your registrar's settings, find Mail Settings and select Email Forwarding. Next, find the Redirect Email section, select Add Catch-All, and in the Forward-to field, enter the email address to which you want to forward all messages.

Now you can provide any email address you choose as long as it is part of the same domain and no one has any way to connect it to your main email address. If you chose a domain name like "love zebras.

4. Create working new email addresses

If you like the idea of ​​having your own domain and creating email addresses for every conceivable use case, but also want to be able to send emails from those addresses, you need another solution. Catch-all email addresses are free to set up and there is no cost to your registrar to forward emails.

If you want fully functional mailboxes for all your dummy users, you'll either need to create your own email server and add users or sign up with a provider like Google Workspace or Zoho to manage the server and make it quick and easy to create new user accounts.

5. AnonAddy manages your email aliases

Keeping track of aliases while maintaining the privacy of your real email account is a juggling act, and AnonAddy takes the stress out of maintaining alias lists. It allows you to create email addresses on the go and reply to emails using your regular email account.

With AnonAddy's free tier, you create a username and get the subdomain your_username.anonaddy.com. You can come up with any alias and put it anywhere

corresponding. When AnonAddy receives an email with an address ending in "@your_username.anonaddy.com", a new alias will be created and the email will be forwarded to your regular email account.

Clicking reply will not reply directly to the sender, but to AnonAddy via your email alias. AnonAddy will then forward your reply to the original sender - making it look like the email came directly from your alias!

In the AnonAddy dashboard, you will be able to see all your email aliases along with statistics on how many aliases are in use, how many emails have been forwarded, and how many replies you have sent.

While the free tier limits you to the "anonaddy.com" or "anonaddy. me" subdomain, the paid tiers allow you to use your own domain.

6. Host AnonAddy on your hardware without limitations

AnonAddy is an excellent service, but you may not like the limitations, and you may not be willing to pay for the full product anyway.

AnonAddy is free and open source software, which means that the source code is freely available: you can freely modify it, freely use it, and freely redistribute it.

 you can set up AnonAddy on a VPS or on your own hardware at home yourself. You will be able to use any domains you choose and change AnonAddy to suit your needs. This is not a project for beginners and you will need some basic Linux fundamentals to complete the deployment successfully.

Create aliases to mask or hide your email address

We've shown you six ways to mask or hide your email address to protect it from leaks, scammers, and spammers. Each of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages and varying degrees of difficulty.