Forwarding or inbox

Every alias works one of two ways, and the difference matters more than it looks.

Forwarding

The alias has a mailbox attached. Mail arrives, we pass it to your real address, we store nothing.

This is the default and the one to use unless you have a reason not to. Your mail ends up where your mail already is, searchable in the client you already use, backed up however you already back things up.

Inbox only

The alias has no mailbox. Mail arrives and stays here, and you read it on this site.

Use it when there is nowhere to forward to, or when you do not want a particular stream of mail landing in your real inbox at all. You can also sign up with no forwarding address whatsoever, which is the most anonymous way to use this service: we then have no address for you of any kind.

The cost is that we are now holding your mail. It is encrypted at rest, and you can additionally turn on the private inbox so that even we cannot read it. But it is here, on a schedule, and it gets deleted.

The thing that catches people out

An inbox-only alias cannot send mail anywhere.

Replying by email needs somewhere to reply from, and a reply through a masked address only works because we can prove the reply came from your verified mailbox. With no mailbox, there is nothing to verify, so a reply attempt is refused rather than delivered.

We used to hand out masked reply addresses for inbox-only aliases anyway, which meant people would try to use them and get an incomprehensible bounce. We do not any more: the reply address is not offered, and existing ones say what is wrong.

You can still write from the web inbox, which sends through us and works fine. It just is not something you can do from your own mail client.

Switching

You can change your mind. Add a mailbox to an inbox-only alias and it starts forwarding; remove it and mail is kept here instead. Messages already stored stay stored, on the same clock.

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.