Making your first alias

Four ways, in rough order of how often you will use them.

From the dashboard

Press the button. You get a random address on one of our shared domains.

Give it a note while you are there, something like "gas company" or "that forum". In a year you will have sixty of these and the note is the only thing standing between you and a list of meaningless strings. It is encrypted at rest, so it costs you nothing to be specific.

From the browser extension

The fastest path, and the one that actually changes your habits. On any signup form, click the extension, and it makes an alias with the site's domain already filled in as the note.

From a mail client

If you have the SMTP add-on, you can send from an alias directly and skip the web entirely.

By using an address that does not exist yet

Only with your own domain. Turn on catch-all and any address at your domain works immediately, with the alias created on first use. Invent plumber@yourdomain.com at the counter and it exists.

This is the most useful feature we have and the one people discover last.

Naming

You get a choice of style:

• Random, like k7fq2m@. Unguessable, and reveals nothing if it leaks
• Words, like quiet-harbour-41@. Readable over the phone, which matters more often than you would think
• Custom, if you are on your own domain, like netflix@yourdomain.com

Custom names on a shared domain are a bad idea and we make them harder to create for that reason: john@alias.mom is guessable, and once someone knows your naming pattern they can find your other aliases.

Limits

The free plan is 10 aliases. Premium removes the limit. If you are moving from another service, use the importer rather than recreating them by hand.

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.