When you have a hundred of these

The first ten aliases are easy. The problem starts later, and it is always the same problem: you have an address and no idea what it was for.

Notes, first and always

Give every alias a note when you make it. It is encrypted at rest, it costs nothing, and it is the difference between a list of addresses and a list of relationships. If you do one thing on this page, do this.

Tags

Free-form labels, many per alias. shopping, work, dubious, 2019. Filter by them in the list, and act on a whole tag at once.

Tags earn their place when you want to answer "which of these did I make while signing up for things I no longer use", which is not a question a folder structure answers well.

Directories

A prefix that groups aliases structurally rather than by label. Useful with your own domain, where you can have every shop-* address behave as a set.

Tags for how you think about an alias, directories for how it is addressed. Most people need tags and never touch directories.

Search

The alias list filters as you type, across addresses and notes. There is a command palette on the dashboard for keyboard use.

Bulk actions

Select several and disable, delete, tag or move them together. The moment this becomes necessary is usually the moment you audit an old account and find twenty aliases from a service you left in 2022.

Presets

If you keep making the same kind of alias with the same settings, save it as a preset and make the next one in a click.

Importing

Moving from another service, export from them and import the CSV here. The import refuses to overwrite an address already registered to someone else, which matters on shared domains.

Note what does and does not come across: addresses, notes and destinations do. Contact history does not, because they do not export it and we would not want it if they did.

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.