Most people have an unfortunate number of email addresses and emails being hurled at them every day. You may have more than one personal email account, and more than one business email address. So at the very least, you have two email inboxes, which is still one more than you ideally need.
Then, there’s the emails. Yes, your inbox is the place where you get important messages that you care about, but they’re also on the receiving end of random newsletters that you signed up for... for some reason. So you going through your inbox turns into the sport of finding needles in haystacks, where needles are relevant emails, and the hay is, well, more or less - spam.
Another issue with sharing your real email address online is privacy. Divulging your real email address, which includes your name, leaves your identity quite “naked.”
There’s an all-in-one solution to most of your email troubles and it’s called email aliases.
What Are Email Aliases?
Email aliases are sort of like pseudonym email addresses which still get directed to your main email account. In other words, an email alias is a forwarding email address or an email address that automatically gets its received emails resent to an inbox and email address of your choosing. In the end, what you have is emails sent to various addresses ending up in one inbox - the one you really use.
What this means is that you can set up a bunch of email addresses that contain a name other than your own, but still end up in your personal or business mailbox, the one that you originally set up under your real name or a random username that you came up with years ago.
Email aliases are especially useful if you’re running multiple websites and need domain addresses for each of them (like [email protected] and [email protected]), if you need privacy, or if you’re looking for a way to organize your mailbox and reduce spam as humanly (or AI-ly) possible.
Why Should You Use Email Aliases?
There’s a number of reasons why you may find email aliases and pseudonyms useful. To begin with, you may be the owner of multiple websites. For each website, you should have a contact email address that contains your website’s domain in the name, like [email protected] or [email protected]. This is crucial to you seeming professional to your clients - sharing your Gmail address with potential customers may not seem very formal, and sharing an email address that you’ve set up in your childhood and is now quite silly will seem facetious.
There’s a number of reasons why you may find email aliases extremely useful. Let’s take a look.
- You’re the owner of multiple websites. For each website, you should have a contact email address that contains your website’s domain in the name, like [email protected] or [email protected]. As we already briefly covered, each website and business that you’re a part of will require its own domain-related email address, so that you can seem professional to your client base. So, while you must have multiple domain email aliases, it doesn’t mean that you need multiple mailboxes. In fact, by using email forwarding, one can do the trick!
- Protect your privacy. If you’re trying to protect your privacy for any reason - maybe you’re a ghostwriter, or you just don’t want random websites knowing your name - you may be considering creating dummy email accounts. Unfortunately, however, as “dummy” as this email account may be upon conception, it’s going to come with its own host of demands and responsibilities. You’ll still need to remember the username and password, check it regularly, and so on. By using a pseudonym or email alias, you can maintain your online privacy without dealing with the hassle of creating a separate email account. All you’ll need to do is forward emails sent to your alias to your main mailbox.
- Organize your main inbox. Even though you’ll forward all emails to one place, email aliases allow you to filter your messages based on which alias was specified as the receiver. You can assign different functions to different email aliases: one for work, one for pleasure, one for spam-y newsletters for companies. Then, you can adjust the settings for each alias.
For instance, you can decide on an alias email which you use to sign up for random accounts/ newsletters, and then tweak the settings on your main mailbox to move all emails sent to that alias to the spam folder or mark them as read. Some shopping websites ask for customers to make an account (for some reason) before shopping. Just give them your alias! Why should they have your real address?
On the other hand, high-priority emails, ones sent to you by family or coworkers, will be at the top of your message pile if you choose to manually prioritize them.
How to Set up Email Aliases
The best way to set up emails aliases and pseudonyms, so that you can forward emails sent to various addresses to your very own inbox, is to sign up for an email forwarding service. At ForwardMX, we allow you to set up email forwards for an unlimited number of email addresses, so you can create as many aliases as you need to keep your mind at ease and declutter your inbox. You can create multiple pseudonyms and aliases, and then adjust the settings to decide what happens to emails sent to any one of your alias emails.