Your email address is the center of your digital identity. It's your login for almost every account you have, it's been in dozens of data breaches, and it's almost certainly in data broker profiles right now. The solution isn't to stop using email — it's to use it differently.
Why Your Real Email Address Is a Problem
When you give your real email to a retailer, app, or website, several things happen: it gets added to marketing lists, it gets sold to data brokers, and if the company gets breached, your email plus password combination ends up on dark web marketplaces. Attackers run those credentials against your bank, your email provider, your Amazon account. One breach becomes many.
More importantly, your email is a persistent identifier. Ad networks track you across the web by hashing your email address. Every site that has your email can link your activity to a single profile — even across different devices and browsers.
Email Aliases: The Solution
An email alias is a disposable forwarding address that delivers mail to your real inbox without revealing your real address. You give out the alias; your real address stays private. If the alias starts receiving spam, you delete it — no impact to your real inbox.
The best tools for this:
SimpleLogin (simplelogin.io) — open source, has a generous free tier, integrates with ProtonMail. Create unlimited aliases, receive and reply from them without revealing your real address.
Apple Hide My Email — available with an iCloud+ subscription. Creates random Apple-managed aliases. Works seamlessly with Safari's autofill on Apple devices.
Firefox Relay — free for up to 5 aliases, built by Mozilla, easy to use.
For Maximum Anonymity: ProtonMail
If you need an email account with no connection to your identity, ProtonMail (proton.me) is the standard. It's end-to-end encrypted, based in Switzerland, requires no personal information to create an account, and has never cooperated with US surveillance requests.
Create a ProtonMail account using a VPN and you have an email address with essentially no trail back to you.
A Simple System That Works
Here's how to structure your email for maximum privacy:
- Real email address (ProtonMail) — only for accounts that actually matter: banking, government, medical
- Aliases via SimpleLogin — one per service for shopping, newsletters, app signups
- Throwaway address (temp-mail.org) — for any one-time signup where you just need to verify an email
This way, your real email is never in a breach database, never in a data broker profile, and never connected to your online activity.
The Bottom Line
Your current email address has probably been in at least one breach. Check at haveibeenpwned.com. If it has — and it almost certainly has — now is the time to start using it differently.