Masked Email
 

Masked email section appeared in my settings allowing junk addresses to be created for subscribing to newsletters etc
Obviously copied from iCloud+ hide my email 😀

One problem I have found using these throwaway email addresses is that sometimes when you want to unsubscribe from something it doesn't work unless you can do it by sending an email from the throwaway address. True, this is only with a very few sources of email, but it is a pain in the neck. Another possible problem is when you want to change email services for some reason or main email addresses and all of a sudden you have a million things you need to change the email address for if you want to still keep getting them.

You can send from the masked addresses in Fastmail. If you reply to anything sent to that address, it will automatically use it - otherwise you need to create an identity for it.

The biggest advantage of the FastMail implementation over the iCloud+ one is that FastMail doesn't suffer from the disappearing email syndrome 😀

Why does the feature require a user to have 1Password?

I've tried it out myself and it works without 1Password.

Oh, I see. So the integration simply allows 1Password to save the masked email into FM settings directly, and creates the name (the domain) for it.

I have a custom domain, so don't think I'd really use this new feature.. I use (theirdomain)@(mycustomdomain), which I can also turn off via rules.

Yeah, what's nice about this feature is that you don't have to create an identity for the alias, although you still need to use a fastmail client.

iCloud+ gets around this by relaying the message and changing the from/to addresses.

My biggest wish with this feature is being able to specify the folder it gets delivered to when I create the email.

I just started playing around with the Masked email setting and to see it's not something I would choose to use. FM chooses the local part of the email address. That's probably why you need a description to remind you what it is for. I think I like my way better when I overload a single alias (e.g., foo@mm.st) with something appropriate (e.g., example@foo.mm.st) and take advantage of FM's fuzzy folder matching to handle the filtering for me.

It's also not clear to me how you send masked email addresses. As best as I can you need to create a sending identity for each one of these things. It's not automatic. That could really will clutter up the compose "from" drop down menu (speaking of sending identities, found another new "feature" but I'll post that under a separate thread).

Update:
Just noticed the previous post about being able to reply to these things if you don't need to send from them originally.

If you are responding to an email sent to a masked email, it automatically uses the masked email as an identity. Otherwise, it doesn't show masked emails as identities, so it doesn't clutter the list.

I really wish there was a similar feature for emails sent to plus/subdomain addresses, where it automatically uses that e-mail address instead of having to create an identity first.

Having a completely random email address does have some advantages. I've seen spammers manipulate stuff after the plus sign. It's also useful when dealing with businesses in person - either the plus is confusing, the plus isn't accepted, or they're going to ask about the business name being in the email address.

Believe me when I say that any email address that is not "normal" will be entered incorrectly a high percentage of the time by low-payed employees. And, yes, this is not automated a lot of the time. For genuine sign ups for things you want to get communications from you need to have a simple and easy to type email address that goes to a very easy to spell domain that is a .com. For junk signups use anything you want, but I would recommend just getting a free Gmail address that then forwards to your main email inbox. That guarantees that Gmails superior spam filtering gets rid of the nasty stuff, and if needed you can just get rid of it. I have Gmail addresses that are 15 years old that almost never have spam delivered to the inbox despite having been used all over the Internet and being exposed in more than one data breach. Their spam and malware detection is that good.

But doesn't "Almost never" mean then you have to still go visit that gmail account within every 30 days (gmail's spam lifetime) to check it for false positives? As good as it is you can never assume it's 100% perfect.

Not if you use the Gmail address for unimportant stuff. Important things: I use a main email address that I check daily and occasionally (weekly) check the spam folder.

That might cause a problem if the chosen words are somehow inappropriate for the recipient's organisation. For example if you use a masked email address to talk to your local Police and the word "pig" appears in the address.

We try not to use words that have negative connotations, but yes - the fact that the words are all English is definitely something we're looking at having options to change in future.

As for the specific case - you do get to see the address before creating it, and you have an option to regenerate (up to 5 times) if you don't like the one you get. So that takes a lot of the possible risks out.