Navigating an internet full of data brokers, spam, scams, and malware(nouvelle fenêtre) feels increasingly difficult. That’s why Proton Pass goes beyond helping you manage, store, and autofill your passwords. We give you the tools to take control of your privacy and protect your inboxes with hide-my-email aliases.
We’ve already written about what an email alias is, so in this article we’ll explore the new advanced alias management features in Proton Pass, including the ability to send emails from your aliases and add custom domains and mailboxes.
Why are email aliases important for protecting your privacy?
Modern life necessitates the sending of many emails. Whether it’s in your personal or your professional life, email is one of our dominant forms of communication. Your email address has become very valuable because so much personal data is attached to it. With just your email address, it’s possible to find information that includes:
- Name
- Date of birth
- Gender
- Address
- Social Security number
- Employment records
Your digital identity is made up of all of this information, and it’s often attached to the personal email address you use all over the internet. Data brokers are companies that make money by acquiring your personal data and selling it to businesses to help them target you with ads. The data gleaned from your email address is exactly what data brokers are looking for.
Email aliases are a great way to protect your privacy and hide your personal email address and thus your digital identity. By creating email addresses with no identifying information, you make it harder for these data brokers to learn anything about you or collect your data. The aliases you create in Proton Pass are available for everyone, whether they’re using our free service or paying for a plan. Email aliases are an essential tool in the fight for digital privacy, and we believe everyone should be using them.
Let’s examine some of the ways that the new email alias features available in Proton Pass Plus can help you in your day-to-day life, whether you’re at home or at work.
Banish spam in just a few clicks
Email aliases can be as temporary as you need them to be. You can create them to receive newsletters and product updates, or to carry out a single transaction. This is ideal, because you’re limiting the number of people who have access to your personal email address. If your personal email address is leaked in a data breach, this causes a great deal of unnecessary administrative work. Your email aliases prevent your personal email address from being affected by a data breach by masking it with a name that can’t be connected to you. But your aliases themselves can still begin receiving spam, or be leaked in a business data breach.
Imagine that you want to try shopping with a new online brand, but you’ve never used it before. To be safe, you create an email alias to carry out an order so that you don’t have to give an unknown entity your personal email address. You complete the transaction and receive your goods in the mail shortly after. Everything seems fine, but the email alias you use for online shopping begins receiving spam emails. It’s obvious that either the original service has sold your alias address or they’ve fallen victim to a data breach. Thankfully you’re able to deactivate the alias and you don’t have to create a whole new personal email, which would be deeply disruptive. None of your personal data is compromised.
Creating and deleting aliases only takes a few clicks, and Proton Pass will suggest new randomized email aliases as you sign up for new accounts online. These aliases will automatically forward your emails to your inbox, and you’ll be informed if any of your aliases are compromised.
Private communication from any alias
It’s possible to create email aliases using many services online. But Proton Pass takes the functionality of your aliases further by allowing you to send emails using aliases(nouvelle fenêtre). Being able to both send and receive emails to your alias addresses means that your aliases operate more like additional email addresses rather than a filtering or privacy mechanism.
For instance, say you’re using an alias to shop online to protect your personal data and prevent data tracking. Instead of using your personal email, eric@ericnorbert.com, you create a dedicated alias for the sake of this transaction, purchase.onslaught415@passmail.net. The alias can’t be traced back to your personal email address because it doesn’t share the same domain or use any part of your name. You make a purchase using this alias, but there’s an issue with the product you receive. To contact customer service without exposing your personal email address, you can create a contact in Proton Pass for the shop to send an email from your dedicated purchase alias and correspond directly with the online shop with all of the emails being forwarded to your personal mailbox.
Email aliases can also be used to communicate privately if you’re selling something online, or communicating with clients for marketing purposes. Think of your email aliases as a way to not just protect your privacy, but to communicate privately.
Get more from your personal or business domains
Email aliases are a cost-effective way to create professional branding and manage communications for small businesses. Instead of having to create an additional email address with a different service, or even pay for additional hosting services beyond your business domain, it’s easy to create and manage email aliases for your business with your existing personal email address.
If you’re a small business owner, you can also create an email alias for your business and use your custom domain. This way, you can connect your main calendar to your email alias for arranging calls, and create specific aliases for customer service, product support, and customer feedback for free. When you’re starting out as a business, it’s essential to keep your costs low and not rely on too many paid services: email aliases help you get the most out of both your business domain and your email service.
Manage aliases across multiple inboxes
When you create a new alias in Proton Pass, you can now choose which mailbox you’d like to receive emails to, allowing greater customization and organization for your inbox. You can also send or reply to emails sent to your alias from that mailbox.
And you can even opt to have emails sent to an alias forwarded to friends or family if they’d like help setting up their own email aliases. If a family member wants to carry out a transaction online but isn’t confident creating aliases for themselves yet, you can help them with a one-time alias that protects them.
You can also share an alias with other people if you’re organizing a trip together. Booking restaurants, tours and car rental services requires a lot of confirmation emails, which you can forward to multiple inboxes so that everyone has access to the same information for ease. Everyone is updated in real time, and everyone is able to send emails via the shared alias if they need to.
Once you’ve created an email alias, you can change the mailbox for it if you’d like to declutter one of your inboxes. Say you’ve created email aliases to sign up to newsletters and workshops for professional development. You can easily change the inbox for your aliases to your work mailbox.
We offer unlimited email aliases on our Proton Pass Plus plan and our Proton Pass for Business plans, so you can experiment with using aliases in a way that works for you.
Get the most out of your email aliases with Proton Pass
Proton Pass goes beyond helping you manage your passwords: it’s a tool that helps you protect your digital identity and communicate securely using many different features:
- Integrated 2FA authenticator
- Secure password sharing
- Dark web monitoring for extra protection
- Passkey support on all platforms
- A privacy-first ecosystem including VPN(nouvelle fenêtre), email, drive, and calendar.
Sign up for a Proton Pass account to take back control of your digital privacy today.
