Sending from a real mail client

Replying through a masked address covers most cases. If you want your alias to behave like a normal account in Thunderbird, Apple Mail or your phone, that is the SMTP add-on.

What you get

Send as any alias from any client, with no web interface involved. Compose to someone who has never written to you and it just works.

Setting it up

Create an app password for the alias in the dashboard. It is shown once and stored hashed, so if you lose it you make a new one rather than looking the old one up.

Then in your client, an outgoing account with the alias as the username and the app password as the password. Host and port are on the settings page.

App passwords

One per alias. That is deliberate: a client compromised with one app password can only send as one alias, and revoking it affects nothing else.

Revoke them individually from the dashboard whenever a device goes away.

Sending limits

Outbound is rate limited, and new accounts get a lower ceiling than established ones. This is deliberate and it is not about you: an alias service that lets a fresh account send thousands of messages an hour becomes a spam source within a week, and then every alias we host lands in spam. The limit protects the deliverability of everybody else's mail.

Established accounts get a considerably higher limit, premium higher still.

Receiving

There is no IMAP. Forwarding aliases deliver into your existing mailbox, which your client already reads, so there would be nothing for IMAP to serve. Inbox-only aliases are read on the web.

Something here wrong or missing? Tell us. These pages live in the same repository as the code, so a correction is a one-line change.