The 7 Best Email Alias Services in 2026, Compared

An email alias is a forwarding address that stands between your real inbox and everyone who asks for it. Give each website its own alias and you can see exactly who leaked or sold your address, shut off any sender with one switch, and keep the address you actually live in out of breach dumps. If the idea is new to you, our primer on what an email alias is covers the mechanics. This page is about the harder question: which service to trust with the job.

There are more alias services now than there were two years ago, and their pricing pages disagree with most of the roundups written about them. So we did this the slow way. Every price, limit and behaviour below comes from the provider's own pricing page or documentation, fetched on 13 August 2026. Where a provider's pages do not answer a question, we say that it is not stated rather than guessing, because a wrong number in a comparison like this is worse than a gap.

One disclosure before anything else. YeyMail, the fourth entry below, is our product. We have tried to hold it to the same standard as everyone else, including a cons list as blunt as any on this page, but you should weigh our judgement accordingly. Where a competitor is better, we say so plainly, because on several counts they are.

How we compared

Six things decide whether an alias service will still be serving you well in five years, and they are the six things we checked for every entry:

• Price, and what the cheapest paid tier actually includes.
• The free tier, if there is one, and whether free aliases can reply.
• Custom domains: whether you can run aliases on a domain you own, since that is the only kind of alias that survives switching providers.
• Reply handling: whether you can answer a message without exposing your real address, and how much setup that takes.
• What survives cancellation: what happens to your aliases the day you stop paying.
• Ecosystem lock-in: how much of the service only works inside one company's platform.

A note on the order of those criteria. Price is listed first because it is what every comparison page leads with, but it is the least important item on the list. Every service here costs less per month than a coffee. What separates them is everything after the price: whether the aliases are portable, whether replying leaks your address, and what the provider does with your mail on the way through. Judge them on the last four criteria and use price as the tiebreaker, not the filter.

The cancellation question turned out to be the hardest to research. Most providers simply do not say, anywhere on their public pages, what happens to your aliases when a subscription lapses. Where that is the case the table below says "not stated", and we would suggest asking before you depend on one, because an alias service failing quietly is exactly the failure you adopted it to avoid. We have written before about what happens if you stop paying and why it deserves more attention than the sign-up page gets.

1. SimpleLogin: the open-source default

SimpleLogin is the closest thing the alias world has to a default recommendation, and it earns it. The free plan gives you 10 aliases with the ability to reply from them, which is more usable than most free tiers on this page, the code is open source, and the pricing page says the service is "100% funded by the community" with no ads or data tracking. That same page states plainly that "SimpleLogin is the product of Proton AG, registered in Switzerland", so if independence matters to you, know that it is no longer a standalone company; premium plans now bundle Proton Pass, Proton's password manager.

Premium costs $36 a year, or $4 billed monthly, and removes essentially every limit: unlimited aliases, unlimited custom domains, catch-all domains, five subdomains, unlimited mailboxes, PGP encryption and the ability to start new emails from an alias. On features per dollar it is very hard to argue with, and we will not try.

Pick SimpleLogin if you want the most complete feature set from an established name, or if you already live inside the Proton ecosystem and want aliasing attached to the same account. The cons:

• Owned by Proton, so choosing it no longer spreads your risk across independent providers; your aliases and possibly your mailbox end up with one company.
• If a lapsed account holds more than 10 aliases, the pricing page FAQ says existing ones keep working, but catch-all and directories stop generating new ones and no new domains or mailboxes can be added.
• The free plan is capped at 10 aliases and one mailbox, so serious use means paying.

2. addy.io: cheapest custom domains, plus self-hosting

addy.io, formerly AnonAddy, is the tinkerer's choice. The free plan includes unlimited standard aliases on your own addy.io subdomain, 10 active aliases on the shared domains, and a 10MB monthly bandwidth allowance. The paid plans are the cheapest in this comparison: Lite is $1 a month billed yearly and includes one custom domain, five recipients and 50 anonymous replies or sends a day; Pro is $3 a month billed yearly, or $4 billed monthly, with 20 custom domains, unlimited bandwidth and 200 anonymous replies or sends a day.

It is one of two services here that can be self-hosted (SimpleLogin is the other), and the mobile apps are open source. If your threat model ends with "and then I run the mail server myself", addy.io is the entry to read twice.

Pick addy.io if you want a custom domain for the least money, or the option of taking the software home entirely. The cons:

• The free tier cannot reply or send anonymously at all.
• The 10MB monthly bandwidth cap on the free plan is easy to exhaust with a few attachments.
• Replies are capped per day even on paid plans: 50 on Lite, 200 on Pro.

3. Firefox Relay: a trusted name, five free masks

Relay is Mozilla's masking service, and the free tier is the simplest on this page: five email masks, a browser extension and email tracker removal, from a brand most people already have an opinion about. Premium adds unlimited masks, a unique Relay email domain for creating masks on the fly, anonymous replies and the ability to block promotional email, with phone masking and a VPN bundle on higher tiers.

The awkward part is that we cannot tell you what premium costs. When we checked Mozilla's pages today, no price was displayed and premium sign-up sat behind a waitlist. That may be temporary, but a price we could not read on the provider's own page is a price we will not print.

Pick Relay if five masks cover your needs and you want them from a large, familiar organisation with a browser extension that stays out of the way. The cons:

• Premium pricing was not shown on Mozilla's pages when we checked, and sign-up was behind a waitlist.
• No support for a domain you own; premium's "unique Relay email domain" is a Relay domain, not yours.
• Five free masks is the smallest allowance in this comparison, and replies are a premium feature.

4. YeyMail: documented edges, no free tier

YeyMail is our product. Everything above and below this entry was checked against the providers' own pages; this entry was checked against our own code, which is both easier and a reason to trust it less. Read it with that in mind.

The feature we care most about is the kill switch. Turning an alias off makes our servers refuse mail during the SMTP conversation itself, answering "no such address", so nothing is queued or silently filtered and the sender's system knows delivery failed. That switch is never paywalled and it keeps working after you cancel. Replies need no setup, because the reply address is rewritten on every forwarded message; the documented exception is reply all, where the other people on the thread appear as ordinary addresses in your mail app, so replies to them go out from your real account. Starting a new conversation as an alias requires per-alias SMTP credentials on port 587. On storage, the message body is discarded on delivery; delivery metadata is kept for 30 days and activity records for 90.

Starter is $0.99 a month or $9.48 a year. Plus is $4.99 a month or $47.88 a year, and teams are included in Plus at that price. There is a free 7-day trial with no card, which gives the Starter feature set with lighter limits: 25 shared-domain aliases and one custom domain, with webhooks, catch-all and shared aliases switched off throughout the trial. Aliases are truly unlimited only on domains you own; on the shared yeymail.com domain the ceiling is 500 addresses on Starter and 5,000 on Plus, and that count includes every address ever created there, deleted ones included. Cancellation behaviour is documented rather than discovered: shared-domain aliases keep forwarding up to 20 messages a day indefinitely, nothing is deleted, no new aliases can be created, custom domains pause, and replies drop to zero until a qualifying plan returns.

Pick YeyMail if you run aliases on a domain you own, want the failure modes written down before you hit them, and are comfortable being an early customer of a young service. The cons:

• No free tier; the trial is seven days.
• No SOC 2, no ISO certification, no third-party audit yet.
• A young service with a short track record next to everything else on this page.
• Custom domains pause on a lapsed subscription, and senders see delivery failures while they are paused.
• The shared-domain ceiling counts deleted aliases, so heavy churn eats the allowance permanently.
• Catch-all is Plus-only, there is no self-hosting option, and the extension covers Chrome and Firefox but not Safari.

5. Apple Hide My Email: frictionless for Apple households

If everyone in your house is on Apple devices, Hide My Email is nearly invisible, which is the highest compliment an alias tool can get. It comes with iCloud+, which starts at $0.99 a month for the 50GB tier, and Apple's pages confirm every iCloud+ tier includes it. Addresses can be generated in Safari, Mail, Apple Pay, supported third-party apps and iCloud settings, and Apple's guide is clear about replies: "the email appears as if it were sent from the Hide My Email address", with your personal address staying private. You can deactivate or delete addresses you no longer use.

Pick Hide My Email if your devices, browser and family are already Apple's, and you want aliasing that requires no new account, no extension and no thought. The cons:

• It requires iOS 15, iPadOS 15 or macOS 12 or later and an iCloud+ subscription, so it is only useful inside Apple's ecosystem.
• iCloud+ includes a custom email domain feature, but Apple's pages describe it for your iCloud Mail address; they do not describe putting Hide My Email aliases on a domain you own.
• The aliases live inside your Apple account, which is the deepest lock-in in this comparison.
• Apple's pages do not state what happens to the addresses if the iCloud+ subscription lapses.

6. DuckDuckGo Email Protection: free, unlimited, nothing stored

Email Protection is free, with no paid alias tier at all, and its storage stance is the strongest on this page. DuckDuckGo's help pages state that when an email arrives it removes trackers and forwards the message on, "never saving it on our systems", and adds "we don't even save the headers". You get a personal @duck.com address plus unlimited private, auto-generated addresses created on the fly, and replies are routed through duck.com so they are delivered from the Duck Address they were sent to, no configuration required.

Pick DuckDuckGo if you want unlimited aliases for nothing, with tracker removal thrown in, and you can live with every address ending in @duck.com. The cons:

• Everything lives at @duck.com with no custom domain support, so leaving the service one day means re-registering every alias by hand.
• The help pages cover receiving and replying thoroughly, but starting a brand-new message from a Duck Address is not documented on the pages we checked, so test outbound mail before relying on it.
• Per their docs, replies are unavailable if your forwarding address sits on a domain without an SPF record.

7. Fastmail Masked Email: aliasing inside a paid mailbox

Fastmail is the odd one out here: a full mailbox provider with masking built in, rather than a forwarding layer in front of an inbox you already have. Masked Email is included on every plan, custom domains are supported on the individual plans, and the feature page confirms integration with both 1Password and Bitwarden, so a masked address can be created inside your password manager at the moment you sign up for a site, which in daily use is genuinely the smoothest flow of anything on this page. Fastmail's pricing page quoted us in euros: the Individual plan is €6 a month, or €5 a month billed yearly, with a 30-day free trial and no permanent free tier.

Pick Fastmail if you are ready to move your actual mailbox and want aliasing, hosting and password-manager integration handled by one subscription. The cons:

• Masked Email is a feature of a Fastmail mailbox, so it makes the most sense if you migrate your mail hosting, which is a much bigger decision than adding a forwarder.
• There is no permanent free tier, only the 30-day trial.
• The Masked Email page does not state whether you can reply from a masked address, and the pricing pages do not state what happens to masked addresses after cancellation.

Side by side

Two things stand out from the table. First, "not stated" dominates the last column: of seven services, only two, SimpleLogin and YeyMail, document on their public pages what happens to your aliases after cancellation. Second, the custom-domain column splits the field cleanly into services where your aliases are portable and services where they are not, and that split matters more than any price difference on the page. A cheap alias on someone else's domain is a lease; an alias on your own domain is property.

Which one, for which situation

• Apple-only household: Hide My Email. It is already inside everything you own, and $0.99 a month is the lowest entry price here.
• You want free: DuckDuckGo for unlimited addresses with tracker removal, or SimpleLogin's free plan if ten aliases with reply support is enough.
• You own a domain: SimpleLogin Premium, Fastmail or YeyMail. An alias on your own domain is the only kind that outlives the provider.
• You want self-hosting: addy.io or SimpleLogin, the only two services in this comparison that can be self-hosted.
• You want zero content storage: DuckDuckGo, which says it saves neither messages nor headers, or YeyMail, which discards message bodies on delivery and keeps delivery metadata for 30 days.

The questions to ask before depending on any of them

An alias service sits in front of everything you sign up for, which makes it infrastructure, and infrastructure should be interrogated before you move in. Whichever way you lean, put these to the provider first:

• What happens to my aliases the day my subscription lapses, and is the answer written on a public page I can hold you to?
• Can I use my own domain, and can I export a list of every alias I have created?
• When I reply, what address does the recipient see, and does reply all behave the same way as reply?
• What do you store, and for how long? Message bodies, headers and delivery metadata are three different questions.
• Who owns the company, and what is the plan for my aliases if the service is acquired or wound down?

Most providers on this page are good answers to some of these questions and silent on others. The silence is the finding. Whoever you choose, make them say it out loud before your logins depend on it.