MULTIPLE EMAIL ADDRESSES (Last Update: May 18, 2020)

You can get dozens of alternate email addresses with a forwarding service such as 33mail.com, anonaddy.com or simplelogin.io. These are best for receiving email. Responding with your alternate address may cost money or not be an option at all.

SimpleLogin is an email forwarding service. They offer 15 forwarded email addresses for free, for $30/year the service is unlimited. They use the term alias incorrectly. Their service forwards emails, it is not a second name for a single inbox.

AnonAddy also offers email forwarding. You get a username with them and your email address is something like jcpenny@michaelh.anonaddy.com

Ten Minute Mail offers a random email address that is good for only 10 minutes (but you can get another 10 minutes just by clicking a button). You are assigned the email address as soon as you visit the website home page. Received emails also show up on the website home page. You need do nothing, other than give out the email address. The service uses multiple rotating domain names. It is a free service with no ads and donations are accepted. See a screen shot.

My method is to register my own domain, such as michaelhorowitz.com. Many companies register domains, they are called Registrars. Many registrars offer free email forwarding. There is often no limit on the number of forwarded email addresses. One upside is that you can change email providers without anyone knowing or caring. There are two ways to do this. One is to manually create forwarding rules for each service such as: macys@michaelhorowitz.com and jcpenny@michaelhorowitz.com. The other is to setup "catchall" forwarding such that any and every email to your domain gets forwarded.

Gmail offers email forwarding as a free service. If you are, for example, michael@gmail.com and you coach a soccer team but don't want the soccer moms to have your real email address, you could create michaelsoccer@gmail.com and forward it michael@gmail.com. This does not scale well, however.

Gmail also lets you add a plus sign at the end of your Gmail userid to make unique email addresses. You could, for example, be michael+amazon@gmail.com and michael+jcpenny@gmail.com. Basically, this is an alias. Sounds great, but, some (too many, in my experience) websites consider an email address with a plus sign to be invalid.

Still another approach is to use aliases. An alias offers multiple names for one single email address/inbox. The advantage is that forwarding is not needed. Email providers differ in whether they offer aliases at all, and, in how many they offer. With iCloud Mail, you can have up to three active email aliases. At Fastmail, cheaper accounts offer a few aliases, more expensive accounts offer more.

This article, How to Avoid Spam - Using Disposable Contact Information by David Nield (May 2020) discusses four email forwarding services: Sign in with Apple (for Apple customers only), 10 Minute Mail, Guerrilla Mail and Burner Mail.

As of April 2020, the Firefox Private Relay is in beta testing and not yet open to the public. It will be another email forwarding service.

As a side benefit, multiple email addresses helps to confirm the legitimacy of an email message. If you get a message from your power company warning that the power will be cut off if you don't pay immediately, and it did not come from the email address you use only with them, then its clearly fake.

Another side benefit is that it helps you detect who shared your email address with their "business partners" (spammers).

Need some motivation for creating multiple email addresses? See how often your email address(s) have been included in a data breach at haveibeenpwned.com

If you opt for using your own personal domain, then you can use the Domain Search feature of haveibeenpwned.com to subscribe to your domain and be notified when any of your email addresses have been stolen in a data breach. Way cool. This also lets you download every breach involving your domain as this screen shot demonstrates.

In July 2016, I wrote Defending yourself from Amazon.com which makes the case for having a dedicated Amazon email address.