Email Aliases

 This is the inaugural post for a new series I will be doing called Securing the Tech. I will be publishing information about computer security. Sometimes it will be high level concepts, other times we may dig deep into topics. Hopefully it will remain relevant to what people are needing to know to make their lives more secure.

Today we will be touching on email security. All of us have had that moment when we didn't really want to give our email address, but what else could we do? We give our email address at the risk of increased spam or likelihood of identity theft.

But what can you do?

Two words: email aliases.

Most email services will let you set up multiple email addresses tied to the main email address you use. These "alias" addresses will allow you to keep your email address more private, though to be honest an alias won't work in all situations. 

Depending on your email provider aliases can work very differently.

I am not referring to "plus addressing", an industry standard way of adding a tag to an email address. Put simply, add a plus sign and some text to you email address before the @ and your email server will ignore the tag when delivering your received messages. 

This works, however, only if you are dealing with an honest entity. You email address is still there, easy to strip out. Plussed addressing is a good start, but hardly secure.

I am referring to a separate email address entirely that you can use and throw away if needed, something completely unrelated to your primary email address.

Keep your primary email address for highly trusted contacts and set up an alias to use with businesses and services you subscribe to. This one will be fairly permanent, just creating a level of separation between your primary address and the services you subscribe to. 

Now create a second alias for more "suspicious" characters, one that will get deleted regularly. This email address will be used when you don't want someone to have a permanent record of you, places where it wouldn't matter (to you at least) if they couldn't get in touch with you in the future. Maybe the auto repair shop wants to email you updates, a restaurant asking for your email to access their menu, or some random person on eBay asking for your email address to send you pictures of the item in question. 

So far has been impressed with how Outlook.com has implemented this feature. This article details the process, but basically you can create a new email address to use with your account. This address can send and receive email using your primary mailbox as well as be used to sign into your account (using the same password as your primary account, this can be easily disabled in the settings). It is easy and simple, just another address to the one you already use.

Yahoo Mail works in a similar way to Outlook. When you first set up your aliases you will pick a permanent prefix. This cannot be changed later so make it respectable, but then you can create additional addresses with that prefix (up to three for free, 500 with a paid account). It won't accept anything with that prefix, only addresses you specify. These can be created as needed and deleted just as easily, blocking anybody from emailing you once you remove the alias.

Gmail can do aliases but it isn't as easy as Yahoo or Outlook. You must first create a new email account, this does not have to be with Gmail. In your Gmail settings, under Accounts and Import > Send Mail As you can specify this as an email alias. After that messages sent to the other address will show up in your primary Gmail inbox and you can send messages from the alias address.

Hopefully this will help you keep your digital life a bit tidier and prevent you from getting the copious amounts of spam and junk email that many of us have come to accept.