The Best Ways to Hide Your Email Address - Gizmodo

The idea with aliases, as we’ll outline below, is that they’re more convenient and easier to create (and delete) than entire email addresses.

If you’ve signed up for a free email address with Yahoo, you get a generous 500 disposable email addresses to use, though they all need to start with the same randomly assigned nickname that Yahoo gives you (some nonsensical mix of letters and numbers).

Aside from the nickname you get assigned—which you can’t change—this is actually one of the best alias options out there, with hundreds of free disposable email addresses to choose from.

The alias system that comes along with the Outlook address linked to your Microsoft account is similar to the one that Yahoo offers, but Microsoft only gives you 10 disposable email addresses, rather than 500.

Hide My Email is something different, and creates email addresses that are far more disposable: You can create and delete them more easily, and you get a randomized collection of numbers and characters given to you, so you can’t specify the address that you get.

You can’t send messages from these disposable addresses like you can from a full alias—they’re basically just there to add as an extra layer on top of your main inbox.

If you’re paying Apple for iCloud storage, you get Hide My Email as part of iCloud+, and you can create new email addresses from iCloud on the web or any of your Apple devices in iCloud settings.

The idea is more or less the same as Hide My Email, letting you create disposable email addresses that forward to your main address, and which you can create and delete as needed.

You can add multiple disposable email addresses on top of these for extra protection—you can’t choose what these randomized addresses are, but they’re simple to create and delete.

If you decide to make use of Masked Email, you can generate an unlimited number of random, disposable email addresses that simply forward messages on to your main email inbox.

You don’t get any control over what these addresses are, and you can’t send email from them or use them as you would your main email address.

With the 1Password extension installed on all your devices, you can very easily create a new email address when you’re signing up for something online or inside an app.

It’s perhaps a sign of just how cluttered and crowded our inboxes have become that so many services exist to help you keep your primary email address safe from spam and unimportant messages.

You get the choice of completely random addresses or you can choose your own, and you can create an unlimited number of random aliases for free—although there are monthly bandwidth limits