Tech Talk #183–July 9, 2022
It’s always been a best practice to keep your friends and family emails separate from the flood of emails from the places you’ve shopped online, the newsletters you’ve signed up for, your social media notifications, and all the political emails. For a long time, the best way to keep those essential emails separate from the rest was to use different email addresses for each type of email. It worked, but now you have multiple email addresses and passwords to keep track of.
If only there were an easier way. Spoiler alert, there is. Email aliases are easier to create and delete than regular email addresses but can give you control over what you see in your inbox. Email aliases are email addresses that forward to your primary email account. In addition, you can create filters and labels to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Email aliases can also hide your actual email address if the company you use allows that.
Yahoo
If you use an att.net, sbcglobal.net, or yahoo.com email address, Yahoo lets you use up to 500 email aliases. Open your Yahoo email and then open Settings by clicking on the gear icon in the top right of the screen. Now click on More Settings on the right toward the bottom. Click on Mailboxes and the Disposable Addresses setting and click Add. You’ll need to create a nickname for your disposable addresses, and you’re competing with hundreds of millions of other users, so it might be best just to make up some nonsense and click Add. Now you can create email aliases using whatever you and Yahoo agreed on by adding a keyword after the hyphen. You can also fill out the display name and a description of the purpose of the address. Yahoo email aliases end with @yahoo.com.
Once you don’t need an alias, go back to the Disposable Addresses page in Settings and delete the email address.
Outlook
Microsoft lets you create email aliases and links them to your Microsoft account email address. Only ten are available, but that should be fine for most needs. Open your favorite browser and log in to your Microsoft account. Click on your name and beautiful picture; now click on Your info. Click Edit account info. You can add and remove the email addresses linked to your account here. Outlook email aliases end with @outlook.com.
You can remove aliases from this same screen. However, you can’t reuse an Outlook alias, so make sure you want to delete that alias before pressing delete.
iCloud and Hide My Mail
Apple uses iCloud to provide basic email aliases. Sign in to iCloud on the internet and go to Mail, then click on the gear icon, and go to Accounts to set up your email aliases. Here, all of your aliases end with @icloud.com.
You can use Hide My Mail to create email aliases if you’re paying Apple for more than the standard 5GB of storage. Of course, apple chooses a randomized combination of letters and numbers for you, so you can’t select your email address. But they’re easy to create and delete when you don’t need them anymore.
Gmail
Gmail’s alias options aren’t great, frankly. All you can do is add periods anywhere in your Gmail email address. Then, when you have a period added to your email address, any email addressed to your period-added email address goes right to your inbox. Not great at hiding or even aliasing your email address.
Firefox Relay
If you want to use something other than your email provider to create aliases, Firefox has you covered.
Firefox has rolled out a comprehensive email alias tool. It’s free for now, but Mozilla hasn’t shared any long-term plans for the service. These email aliases end with @mozmail.com and get forwarded to your primary email address, just like all the rest of the email alias providers.
I received an email about an online course on Map Reading & Navigation.
The reviews say the course is so good I’ll be able to read maps backward.
Then I realized it was spam.
Do you have a computer or technology question? Greg Cunningham has been providing Tehachapi with on-site PC and network services since 2007. Email Greg at greg@tech-hachapi.com.