How to Set Up an Email Alias (In About Two Minutes)

Setting up an email alias takes about two minutes. The choice that matters is the kind: a tag on your real address, or an address you can pause.

I run AliasFleet, an email alias service: it gives every website its own email address, which forwards to your real inbox, so when a site leaks the address it holds, you pause that one address and nothing else in your life changes. This guide is the setup. There are three ways to do it, they take about two minutes each, and they are not equal.

One clarification before the steps. This is about a personal alias for signups and everyday accounts. If you are an IT admin adding an alias to a work mailbox in Microsoft 365 or Active Directory, you want your vendor's admin documentation, not this page.

Most guides for this search teach you how to sort mail. Sorting is fine. It is not the point. The point of an alias is that a website never gets the address you actually live in.

The short version

What is an email alias?

An email alias is an address that is not your inbox. Mail sent to it forwards to your real inbox. The website only ever sees the alias. Set up one alias per website and each site's copy of your address is separate from every other site's, so no single leak or spammy sender can reach the real thing.

The setup follows the same five moves whichever method you pick below:

1. Choose the method: a plus tag, your provider's built-in alias, or a dedicated alias service.
2. Create the alias.
3. Confirm where it forwards. There has to be a real inbox underneath, verified.
4. Send yourself a test message and watch it land.
5. Use the alias on one real signup before you roll it out everywhere.

Method 1: plus addressing

How do I set up a plus address?

You do not set it up. It already works. If your address is [e-mail], then [e-mail] is yours as well, and mail sent to it arrives in the same inbox. Gmail, Outlook.com, iCloud, Proton and Fastmail all accept the plus form. Google documents the behaviour in its guide to recipient address variations. The only real work is sorting: in Gmail, build a filter for mail addressed to the plus address, apply a label, and skip the inbox if you want it out of sight.

Now the limits, because they are the reason the other two methods exist. Your real address is sitting inside the alias. Anyone holding [e-mail] holds [e-mail] too, minus four keystrokes. A sender can strip the tag and mail your real address directly, and there is no off switch, because the address is your address. The mail keeps coming until your filters catch it. Some signup forms also reject the + character outright, which you discover at the worst moment, halfway through a checkout.

Plus addressing is a filing system. Treat it as one and it is genuinely useful. Just do not mistake it for privacy.

Method 2: your provider's built-in alias

Every big provider offers some version of an alias inside its own walls. These are real addresses and they cost nothing. They also come with the provider's terms attached.

How do I create an alias in Gmail?

Gmail's version is called Send mail as, and it confuses people because it only solves the sending half. It lets you send from another address you already own: Settings, then Accounts and Import, then "Send email as", add the address, and verify it. Google's own walkthrough is Send emails from a different address or alias. What it does not do is give you a new address that receives mail and forwards it to you. That address has to exist somewhere first.

Worth knowing if you lean on this feature: Google says that from January 2027, Gmail will no longer support Send mail as for third-party addresses such as Yahoo or Outlook accounts. Workspace aliases and other Gmail addresses you own are not affected. The free workaround has an expiry date on it.

What about Outlook and iCloud?

Outlook.com does the fuller version. Microsoft lets you add a new Outlook.com address to your account as an alias; mail to it lands in your inbox and you can send from it. The steps live on Microsoft's add or remove an email alias page. The catch is that the alias belongs to that one Microsoft account, existing Hotmail, Live and MSN addresses cannot be added, and Microsoft caps how many aliases an account can create.

On Apple devices, the strong option is Hide My Email, part of paid iCloud+. It generates a random address per site, forwards it to your inbox, and lets you deactivate an address when it turns noisy. Of everything in this section it is the closest to the real thing. Its limit is reach: it lives in Apple's apps and Safari, so it is right there on your iPhone and awkward everywhere else. iCloud Mail also lets you add a few aliases to your iCloud address without iCloud+, but those are variations on one account, not one address per site.

Provider aliases earn their keep if your life already sits inside one ecosystem. What they are not is portable, and none of them was built for one address per site across everything you use.

Method 3: a dedicated alias service

This is the worked example, and it is the one I built AliasFleet for. The shape is the same at any dedicated alias service; the steps below are ours.

Sign up, and the email address you signed up with becomes your first destination, the inbox everything forwards to, and if you want mail to land somewhere else instead, you add that inbox under Destinations and click the verification link it receives. No verified destination, no forwarding. That check is what stops an alias service being an open relay.

Then go to Aliases and open the create form: a name, a domain, and the inbox it forwards to, with room for a category and a note. Hit Create Alias and the address is live immediately. There is no propagation wait and nothing to configure at the website you are signing up to, so you just paste the alias into its email field instead of your real address.

One alias per site, named after the site. That habit is the whole system, because your alias list then reads like a map of who holds your address, and six months from now, when one of them misbehaves, you will not be guessing which signup caused it.

The full product walkthrough sits in the creating aliases guide in the docs, and your first alias covers the beginner path step by step. The free tier covers 10 active aliases, which is enough for the accounts that matter most while you learn whether the habit suits you. Pricing beyond that is on the pricing page.

Test it before you trust it

How do I know my alias works?

Whichever method you picked, send a test before you use the alias anywhere real. From a second account, or a friend's phone, send a plain message to the new alias. It should land in your inbox within seconds.

If it does not arrive, check three things in this order: the alias is switched on, the spam folder, and whether the destination inbox is verified. That is the order the failures actually happen in, in my experience.

Then use the alias once, on a real signup you do not care much about. A newsletter. A shop account. Watch the mail arrive addressed to the alias. After that the habit builds itself, one signup at a time.

Replying without handing over your real address

Can I reply from an alias?

Receiving is half the story. If a site emails your alias and you reply from your normal inbox, your reply carries your real address, and now the site has it. You will have undone the alias with your own reply.

In AliasFleet, forwarding is two-way. Turn on Can Reply for your destination, and when you reply to a forwarded message it goes out showing the alias as the sender. The site never sees the address underneath. Gmail's Send mail as does the sending half for addresses you own, which is why people pair it with a receiving service, but read the January 2027 change above before you build anything on it.

When an alias starts getting spam

What do I do when an alias leaks?

One morning, an alias you gave to exactly one shop starts receiving lottery scams. You do not have to wonder where they got it. Only one place ever had that address.

Open the alias and pause it. Mail to it bounces back to the sender, and your inbox goes quiet. Your other aliases are untouched, and so is your real address.

That is the entire payoff of the per-site habit, and it takes about ten seconds. For the fuller method, including how to be sure a site leaked your address before you accuse it of anything, see which website leaked my email. It is also worth checking the alias against Have I Been Pwned to see whether it has surfaced in a known breach.

Your old address

Can an alias protect the address I already use?

No. An alias only protects addresses you have not handed out yet. The real address you have used for a decade already sits in hundreds of databases, and no setup guide fixes that. It only stops the list growing.

And the free methods are fine for plenty of people. If all you want is a tidier inbox, plus addressing and two filters will do it, and you should not pay anyone for that, including me. The dedicated service earns its place when you want the per-site control, the reply routing and the off switch, working across every device and provider you use.

Pick one method and set up one alias today, then use it on the next signup you meet. After that, the system mostly looks after itself.