Mask Your Email Address While Using it on Shady Websites

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Consider these situations —

• You want to signup for temporary service.
• You want to contact people on a shady online forum.
• You have to share your Email address with people you don’t trust.

In all the above cases, it makes no sense to use the original Email Address. Anyone can do a reverse Google search of your email address and find out who you are.

Off course, you can use online services like Fake Mail Generator to get disposable Emails, but they are just a temporary inbox. They will delete all your messages after a few hours or days. And not to forget, most temporary emails are caught by spam filters.

We are interested in a long term solution. The masked email should be linked to my original Email address, such that every email response I get on my masked email, should auto-forward to my original Email address. 

Related: Things You Should Know About Email Encryption

And guess what, there are a handful of online services that mask your Email for free. The one that I use and also recommend is Blur (earlier known as MaskMe).

Blur is a browser extension with a focus on privacy. In the free version, you can mask your email and generate a strong password. But if you want the extra option like masking your phone number and credit cards, then you need to pay $4/month. But for our task, the free version is sufficient. 

Follow the Steps

Download and Install Blur on Chrome or Firefox. 

Next, go to Blur dashboard by clicking this URL and sign up with your Email address where you would like to receive forwarded Emails.

Click on Masking> Email Masking.

In the next window, you’ll see a list of your masked Email that you can use for an alias. You can even generate new mask emails for different tasks.

Related: How to Send Encrypted Emails in Gmail and Outlook

That’s it; you can use these email address in other website’s contact form. And any reply you get to this email address will be auto forward to your linked email. These messages will have masked written on the subject line.

Note:

You can only receive emails on your masked emails, you can not use Mask emails to compose a new email. If you want to do that, your only option is to create a new email account from scratch. 

Wrapping up

The service is free and works with every email client. Mask do not access your Email account data.  I’ve tried it on several websites, where temporary email addresses were not accepted. But fortunately, the mask email address generated from Blur worked well.

Also Read: How to Stay Anonymous on the Internet