how it worksThe lifecycle
How aliasing works
No new inbox to manage, nothing to migrate. An alias sits between services and the address you actually care about. The whole lifecycle is three steps.
step 1Hand it out
Give every service its own address
Next time a form asks for an email address, don't reach for the real one. Use an alias for that service, something you'll recognise later, like the shop's name.
The service accepts it like any address, because it is a real address: reachable, and routable. It just isn't the one that matters to you.
Email address
your real address? not in this form.
step 2Mail flows through
Everything lands in the inbox you already read
Confirmations, receipts, newsletters, resets. Mail to the alias forwards straight to your existing inbox, and you read it where you always read mail, in the app you already use.
To the sender, the alias is the whole story. They use your alias rather than your main address.
The service
knows the alias
The alias
forwards it on
You
your inbox
same inbox, same app, nothing new to check
step 3Stay in control
Drop an alias, keep the inbox
If a service leaks its list or turns spammy, you'll see it. Junk arriving on that service's alias names the source.
With aliasing in general, a noisy alias can be disabled at the forwarding layer: mail to it stops being passed on, while every other alias keeps working. How that's done depends on the alias setup. Either way it beats the unsubscribe form, because no permission is requested.
Your aliases
switch one off, everything else carries on
compareOne address or many
Why not keep using one address for everything?
Because one address everywhere is one thread tying every account together. Leak it once and it's everywhere; spam it once and it can be hard to stop; and every service you touch can be linked back to the same identity.
Aliases cut that thread into pieces. Each service holds a different address, and any single piece can be cut loose without touching the rest.