Masked Email Manager
Guide
What is Fastmail Masked Email?
A separate address for every service you sign up to, all forwarding to your real inbox, each with its own off switch.
One address per service
Instead of typing your real address into a signup form, you generate one like
gentle.keys1882@fastmail.com. Mail sent to it lands in your normal
inbox, and Fastmail remembers which site it belongs to.
When one starts receiving marketing you never asked for, or turns up in a breach, you block that single address. Everything else keeps working, and you know exactly who leaked it, because only they ever had it.
The three states
- Active. Mail arrives in your inbox as usual.
- Blocked. Mail goes to Trash instead. Nothing bounces, and you can switch it back on.
- Deleted. Mail bounces. Fastmail keeps deleted addresses in a list you can restore from.
Compared to the alternatives
you+shop@example.com costs nothing and works anywhere, but your real
address is sitting in the string, and anyone who wants to reach you strips the
suffix. It sorts your mail, it does not protect it.
A catch-all on your own domain gives you full control if you already run one, but it advertises the domain, and once spammers find it they can invent addresses at it forever.
Masked addresses are unrelated to each other and to your real one, and each has its own off switch. The cost is that you need a Fastmail account, and making one is a deliberate step rather than something you can invent at the keyboard.
When to use one
Anything you expect to abandon, anything that wants an address before it will show you a price, and shops and newsletters where a leak is a matter of time. Keep your real address for people, for banks, and for anything where losing access would hurt.
Masked Email Manager keeps the whole list on your phone, so you can make one mid-signup and block it later without opening Fastmail.