This is a huge selling point. Private email relays often get blocked, the only lasting solution is to put them on the same domain as, and in the same format as, a significant number of non-private email addresses. As far as I’m aware the only other provider doing this is Fastmail.
Comments about lock-in aren’t wrong, but it has to be this way. You can make arbitrary email addresses at your own domain, but anybody who feels like it can trivially automatically detect that those are all you.
Personally I use unique at own domain only where I’m identifying myself anyway, like my bank, and Fastmail masked email where I’m not. For most things it’s not actually that terrible to accept a small risk that they’re offline for a day between your being booted without warning and you changing your email address with them.
Totally agree with unique at own domain isn't actually privacy. It wouldn't take much of a paper trail to work out the details.
I continue to use it everywhere for a few reasons:
- if someone emails me acting all friendly like we've had some previous relationship but it's sent to linked@mydomain or github@mydomain I know they've just scraped my contact details and it's spam
- similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don't expect it's easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)
- I already use a password manager and have different passwords on every site, but having a different email address too raises the barrier further for someone trying to script an automated attack based off some other pwned data set.
> - similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don't expect it's easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)
This is exactly why I do it, it's eye opening to see exactly which companies leaked your address. As a result of being able to blackhole the leaked addresses I no longer get any spam, the Dvorak dream.
I actually caught a company outright selling my address to AWS of all places, I didn't even know Amazon purchased mailing lists.
AWS were crafty because they didn't directly sell a service, they only offered "resources" for "business leaders" because they knew nothing about what I might need.
Explore the AWS [REDACTED] where business leaders can access eBooks, guides, and customer stories to find practical advice on building or improving upon a data strategy. Learn how you can leverage data as a strategic asset, make better decisions with insights from data, and innovate faster.
I find this very interesting in 2026.
I use my gmail address for everything and I don't really get spam (except from services I've subscribed to legitimately but haven't bothered to configure to not send promotional mail).
I never really get promotional mail from 3rd parties at all.
Is this just gmail filters being very good?
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I agree with all of this. I’d add that it’s useful for sorting and searching. Things like keyword matching, from address, and from domain aren’t as consistent as you’d hope, but companies do need to actually email the address they were given, so you can use it to reliably identify emails from them.
But all 3 of those use cases, plus privacy, can be addressed with word.salad@bigdomain.com. So you may as well get the privacy bit in there.
True, but it requires setting up a mailbox at bigdomain.com for every use case. With your own domain you can just setup a catchall mainbox like catchemall@yourdomain.com and don’t even need to remember any mailbox@bigdomain.com name. Just use github@ and it will be automatically be catched by your catchall.
So any mail to anyrandomstring@yourdomain.com is actually received? Sounds like something that works great when only you do it, but might quickly be abused if it catches on?
I configured about a dozen domains to have MX records for the mailinator disposable inbox service for about a decade for free as a gift and the domains were toxic for any other email use case for years afterwards… they were so abused you couldn’t even sign up for most web services with any email associated by the time I stopped renewing them… there are still GitHub lists of disposable email addresses that list to blacklist those domains (and many other), so, I agree. If the big providers don’t offer disposable email addresses there is no good option.
Mailinator was an awesome service when it first worked. Thank you!!!
The reason it's toxic is because the Venn diagram between disposable email addresses and email addresses used for CSAM is a circle: If you accept disposable email and allow users to upload anything, you will have CSAM.
Whereas a Fastmail masked email or iCloud relay is still in the backend tied to your real account and identity which means it provides privacy generally for you but is traceable enough that it is unappealing for predators.
Why CSAM specifically? Isn’t it mostly going to be just vanilla fraud?
Disposable mail providers generate a ton of spam too, but CSAM is illegal to host, so it's pretty risky to allow them unmitigated.
Indeed, Proton’s passmail are sometimes not accepted sadly.
> This is a huge selling point.
Same thoughts. I'm annoyed with the number of services that blocks alias domains.
At least I don't see services attempting to block @icloud.com domains.