1mo ago

Websites blocking e-mail aliases

Since we started paying for Proton Pass I noticed that a few websites do not allow you to use the generated e-mail. Two that come to mind are Atlassian and Discogs. Has anyone figured our a way to go around this?

15 comments

Two things either don't use their service or you could get your own domain and then set up a catch-all so that you can create as many aliases as you want with your own domain. So like kroger@example.com, walmart@example.com, etc.

My approach with companies that do this: Contact them, explain that I will not be giving them any money due to this aggressive anti-privacy practice, and take my business elsewhere.

Some websites do that. They block at the domain level. It tends to become a escalating game of spinning up new alias domains.
https://proton.me/support/creating-aliases#additional
If you have a paid plan, you can create at least 10 additional addresses (depending on your plan) with any Proton domain (@proton.me, @protonmail.com, @pm.me, or @protonmail.ch) or a custom domain, if you have one.
I have a custom domain, which websites never block, because they have no way of knowing that I use it for aliases.
- Interesting. I think I will consider the custom domain solution then. Thank you!
  
  Having a custom domain for email also makes it a lot easier to move email provider in the future if you want/need to since your addresses can stay the same as long as the new provider supports catch-all for all the aliases.
  
  You could try Proton’s other domains first, because they might not all be blocked. Another option is to use a different company’s mail aliasing/forwarding or for these rare cases.
  
  I do this as well. Bought one from njal.la for $15/yr

A tip is to host your own domain at an e-mail provider that allow you to receive e-mail for any recipient in a single mailbox (i.e. catch-all or wildcard), and use the following alias format when signing up at different websites or services:
<website>@<yourdomain.tld>
This allows you to filter incoming e-mail by which website/service you signed up for, regardless of what domain they send e-mail from (it can be different for account notifications vs newsletters etc.).
It will also help you detect if they have sold your contact details or had a data breach without announcing it publicly, since you wouldn't use that specific e-mail alias elsewhere.

If you happen to be paying for iCloud storage, you could use their hide-my-email service for those rare accounts and have it send to your proton email (apple lets you use an external email to forward to). That's one of the big benefits of apple's alias solution; they are all in the icloud.com domain and no website would ever block that.