By now you should be aware that I don’t like using my personal email for online accounts. I only give my personal email to family, friends, and people I know. So far I’ve used services like 33mail, Abine Blur, and AnonAddy to give online accounts a randomized email address that forwards to my personal email. While these free services are very helpful for ordering food online or signing up for newsletters, I’ve discovered two difficulties with these services:
Some websites have “blacklisted” some services’ domain email addresses when signing up for an account, e.g. opayq.com (get it? opaque? Abine Blur is clever.)
Most of these email forwarding services just forward, they don’t permit replying to an email. In very rare cases, replying to an email would require my personal email…which defeats the purpose of the forwarding service.
The SimpleLogin Strategy
I used SimpleLogin to avoid these two difficulties:
I signed up for a $30/year premium account with SimpleLogin with my chrispersonal@gmail.com account. (not my personal address, but you get the idea.)
In SimpleLogin, I created an alias email for www.tastythai.com, e.g. sublaryngus_megafox@slmail.me which I used to order food online. I also entered an alias name:
In SimpleLogin, I clicked on the Contacts button to bring up the Alias Contact Manager page, entered customerservice@tastythai.com for the specific email address I want to send from my sublaryngus_megafox@slmail.me alias email, and clicked the blue Create reverse-alias button:
I then clicked the green Copy reverse-alias button and pasted that long randomized email in the To: field in my personal Gmail account.
When I click send in Gmail, the Tasty Thai customer support folks never see chrispersonal@gmail.com, they only see my alias name and sublaryngus_megafox@slmail.me.
Is SimpleLogin an alternative for your personal email? No, it does not have an inbox for your to read emails. You still need a personal email account to be the destination for all your forwarded emails. As you can see, I’ve been impressed with how SimpleLogin can be used to protect my personal email on the internet.
The Blacklisted Domain Issue
Yes, there is a possibility that Simplelogin email domains may eventually be blacklisted on some online accounts as mentioned earlier. #NerdAlert - I was able to avoid this possibility connecting one of my Namecheap domains, e.g. www.chrisisadork.com, with my SimpleLogin account to create a catch-all “Auto-create/on-the-fly” alias. By connecting a custom domain in SimpleLogin I can use customized alias email addresses for online accounts such as:
walmart@chrisisadork.com
target@chrisisadork.com
subwaysubs@chrisisadork.com
fugubrex_36retmo@chrisisadork.com
Powerful stuff.