Most people use one email address for everything. It works until that address leaks, is sold or is scraped from a website. Then spam and phishing arrive at the same inbox your bank writes to, and there is no way to tell which company let it out.
What happened to us
We printed a contact address on our own website, in the footer, on the contact page and in the privacy notice. Within weeks it was getting spam. Removing it from the visible pages wasn't enough: the address also sat in the files machines read, such as the site summary written for AI tools and the structured data search engines collect. We took it out of all of them and pointed visitors to a contact form and an encrypted messenger instead.
The address that leaked is still on spam lists, and it will stay there. Removing it stops new harvesting; it doesn't recall the copies already made. That is the case for separate addresses: you want the thing that leaks to be something you can switch off without anyone else noticing.
How a per-account address works
- Each service you sign up for gets its own address, for example one for the library and one for the postal service. All of them deliver to your normal inbox.
- Each address carries a label saying what it is for, so mail to it always tells you who is writing.
- When one starts getting spam, you switch that address off. Mail to it is accepted and quietly dropped, so the sender learns nothing, and every other address keeps working.
- If a service you never gave the address to writes to it, you know exactly who shared it.
Three ways to set it up
| Route | Effort | Good to know |
|---|---|---|
| Your mail provider's built-in masked or alias addresses | Minutes | Easiest. The addresses live with that provider, so moving provider later means moving them too. |
| An alias service such as SimpleLogin or addy.io | An hour | Works with any inbox and handles replies from the alias. Both are open source and can also be self-hosted. |
| Your own domain on a mail server you run | A project | Full control and no extra company in the path. You also take on spam filtering, backups and the reputation of your sending server. |
We started with an alias service and later moved our own mail to a server we run, where each address is a labelled alias with an on/off switch. The idea is the same in all three; pick the one you will actually keep up.
Habits that make it work
- Use your own domain if you can. Addresses on a domain you own can move to any provider; addresses on someone else's domain can't.
- Switch off, don't delete. A switched-off address keeps refusing quietly. A deleted one may fall through to a catch-all and start arriving again.
- Keep one stable address for account recovery on the accounts that matter most, and never publish it.
- Don't print any address on a website. Use a contact form with spam protection, or a messenger link.
What it doesn't do
Separate addresses stop one leak spreading and show you who leaked. They don't hide what's in your mail from your mail provider, and every alias on your own domain still points back to you. For that you need to choose the provider carefully, which is a separate decision.