Have you ever thought about signing up for a newsletter but then didn’t because you didn’t trust the owner not to sell or divulge your email address to third parties? Or perhaps you’ve signed up only to find the owner sold your email to some spammer? This has become an increasingly common concern for people the world over. A lot of people still keeps an old Hotmail from years and years ago and still uses it to sign up for pretty much anything online. This is not by any means optimal and in this article I’ll show you how you can potentially have an infinite amount of adresses with Cloudflare Email Rerouting using only one domain.
I’ve been trying out a couple different ways to try to hide my email adress, some better, some worse. In this article I’ll give you my experience with them and how to set up the Cloudflare option.
- iCloud Hide My Email-feature
Paid feature, from ~$2 per month depending on where you’re at and how much cloud storage you need. Works with iPhone and iPad. - Protonmail paid Alias-feature
Paid feature, from ~$5 per month for 10 alias and ~$10 per month for unlimited alias’ - My own domain on Cloudflare with re-routing
Free, except that you need a domain ~$20 per year
How to hide your email easily
First of all, there’s a lot of different ways to go about doing this, from creating your own email server on a Raspberry Pi in your kitchen, to dedicated services. I haven’t tried those and thus cannot speak on their behalf.
Hide My Email, iCloud
The Hide My Email feature on iCloud+ is a feature everyone who pays for storage at Apple has access to. You can create an unlimited amount of emails by going into. The downside to Apple’s solution is that you need an Apple device to make it work, I haven’t found a way to create email adress’ in Win10.
Alias, Proton Pass/Protonmail
I haven’t used this service other than a couple of times since I don’t have unlimited Alias-adresses. The little I have used it, however, did ive me a good impression. I pay for Protonmail Plus and thus I have 10 Alias emails to use.
Cloudflare Email Rerouting with custom domain
Cloudflare email routing is actually a great service that kind of passed me by for quite some time and it was not until I actually clicked on ”email” and started to read about it I understood the potential.
What is Cloudflare Email Rerouting?
Cloudflare is a place for your domains to live. For anyone unfamiliar with Cloudflare, it’s pretty much a place where you can set DNS records and point your domain to the right places. They also have several ways of protecting you or your site from attacks.
Recently they also added a way to handle email directly in Cloudflare, which means that you can have every single email being sent to [email protected] rerouted to your primary email [email protected]. It can also catch every single email sent to any adress on a specific domain and send it to another email. This should be used with caution!
CLoudflare explains it well here:
Cloudflare Email Routing is designed to simplify the way you create and manage email addresses, without needing to keep an eye on additional mailboxes. With Email Routing, you can create any number of custom email addresses to use in situations where you do not want to share your primary email address, such as when you subscribe to a new service or newsletter. Emails are then routed to your preferred email inbox, without you ever having to expose your primary email address.
Email Routing is free and private by design. Cloudflare will not store or access the emails routed to your inbox.
Pre-requisites:
- Custom domain
- Point the domain to Cloudflare’s nameservers
- An email account
How to set it up Cloudflare Email Rerouting:
- Start with making sure you have your own domain and point it at Cloudflare’s nameservers.
- Sign up for Cloudflare, if you haven’t already.
- When you log in, click on the website you want to use with email routing.
- Click on ”Email” in the menu on the left side.
- Click on ”Routing rules”
- Here you can set a ”Catch-All adress” if you’d like, otherwise just leave this empty and click ”Create adress”
- Add a prefix to your new custom email adress. I normally name them after the service they handle. For a new Instagram account i.e. I’ll name the adress [email protected], that way I know immediately what service it’s set up with and what username it handles, should I have more than one account for that service.
- Under ”Action” you can add rules to what should happen to emails being sent to this adress. Choose ”Send to an email” to have them rerouted to your primary email adress.
- Under ”Destination” you decide what email adress should receive these rerouted emails. Use your primary email, or a ”Catch-All” adress that you check occationally. The first time you add a receiving adress you need to verify you own it, after this you can enter it on as many custom adress’ as you like.
- Click ”Save” and you’re done! You’ve now created a new email that you can sign up to services all around the web with and made sure the emails being sent there are beign rerouted to your primary email. All without giving away your primary adress!
What if you don’t need the email anymore?
Here is the beauty of Cloudflare’s service! If you don’t want to receive emails from this sender anymore, just simply head back into Cloudflare → Email → Routing Rules and Inactivate the adress. No more emails will reach their destination after this, and should you realise you made a mistake, simply activate it again.
Should I use the domain for my personal website?
I have the domain gfek.se that I use for this very website, however, I don’t use this domain to create new emails. This is simply because I don’t want to leave a trail here and since I have real emails on this domain that are easy to guess. Let’s say you sign up for a newsletter, then the owner can simply type in the domain and check the website for other email adresses. For example, if I use this domain, gfek.se to sign up for AwesomeNewsletter I might create a new email with the name [email protected]. This somehow gets in the hands of hackers or other malicious people and by simply typing “gfek.se” in the search bar they find a lot of other information, such as my primary email, etc.
That’s the simple reason I use another domain name for signing up to stuff online. Make sure to set up Cloudflare Email Routing or any similar service to protect yourself today as well. An ever growing part of the internet is being closed off to visitors without accounts, make sure you have safe access to those parts!
Hope you found this guide helpful! Please give me a shoutout if you have any comments or questions, find errors or have suggestions on improvements.
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