Every email alias service will tell you what you get when you pay. The pricing page is thorough about it. What almost nobody writes down anywhere prominent is the other half of the contract: what happens to the hundreds of addresses you have scattered across the web on the day your card expires, your bank declines a renewal, or you simply decide to stop.
For most subscriptions this question is trivial. Cancel a streaming service and you lose films you never owned. Cancel an alias service and the stakes are different, because the addresses themselves stay behind on other people's servers. Your bank has one. Your electricity supplier has one. Forty newsletters and every shop you have ever bought from have one each. If those addresses stop receiving mail, you do not lose a feature. You lose password resets, invoices, security alerts and delivery notices, silently, at every one of those sites at once.
We run YeyMail, an alias service, so we have an obvious interest in how this question gets answered. The only honest way to handle that is to declare the interest, answer the question for ourselves first, in full and including the parts that do not flatter us, and then put exactly the same question to the rest of the market using each provider's own documentation, fetched this month, not quoted from memory.
The one question that decides everything
An email alias is not really a product you use; it is a commitment the provider makes to keep a door open. What an alias is worth depends entirely on whether it still receives mail in year three, long after the enthusiasm of signup has faded. The address is the hostage. Once your bank knows you as name@alias-provider.example, the provider is standing between you and every message your bank will ever send. A provider that stops forwarding the moment payment stops is holding that hostage against your renewal, whether it means to or not.
So the question to ask before trusting any alias service is not about features. It is: on the day I stop paying, what exactly happens to the aliases I already have? A provider should be able to answer precisely, in writing, before you have created a single address. Here is our answer, followed by everyone else's.
Our answer, exact and complete
When a YeyMail subscription lapses, whether you cancelled deliberately or a card quietly failed:
- Aliases on the shared yeymail.com domain keep forwarding, up to 20 messages a day, indefinitely. Not for a grace period. Indefinitely.
- Nothing is deleted. Every alias you ever made is still yours and still in your dashboard.
- You cannot create new aliases until you subscribe again.
- Custom domains pause. This is the unflattering part: mail sent to aliases on your own domain stops, and senders get a delivery failure, until you either subscribe again or point the domain's MX records somewhere else.
- Replies drop to zero.
- Catch-all and the webhook URL are switched off while the plan is inactive. When you return to a plan that includes them, both come back on by themselves, exactly as you left them; anything you had switched off yourself stays off.
- The kill switch keeps working on everything. Disabling an alias makes our server refuse its mail during the SMTP conversation, so the sender gets a rejection at the door rather than a black hole. That control is never paywalled and never expires.
The replies line deserves a sentence more, because on an active plan replying through an alias needs no setup at all: the reply address is rewritten on every message we forward. Reply all is the documented exception, since the other people on the thread appear as ordinary addresses in your mail app, and replies to them go out from your real account. After a lapse, replying through the alias stops entirely until you subscribe again.
That is the complete list. The two genuinely sharp edges are custom domains pausing with visible delivery failures, and replies stopping. We think 20 forwarded messages a day on shared-domain aliases covers what matters most, which is that password resets and account notices keep arriving, but we will not pretend the list has no edges.
What the rest of the market does, according to its own documentation
Everything below was checked against each provider's own published pages in August 2026; the exact pages are in the sources. Where a provider's documents do not answer the question, we say so, because that silence is itself an answer.
SimpleLogin has the most generous documented policy we found. Its FAQ states that when a premium subscription ends, "All aliases/domains/directories/mailboxes you have created are kept and continue working normally." You cannot create new aliases beyond the free plan's limit of 10, and you cannot add new domains, directories or mailboxes, but existing custom domains keep receiving mail. On custom domains that is plainly more generous than our policy, and it deserves to be said that way.
addy.io documents its lapse behaviour clearly, and it is stricter. When your subscription ends, the account reverts to the free tier: aliases on paid-plan-only domains are deactivated, custom domains are deactivated, and any shared-domain aliases beyond the free limit of 10 are deactivated as well. You cannot reactivate them until you resubscribe, though addy.io states that resubscribing within 90 days reverts the changes automatically. One detail worth knowing: addy.io's help pages say mail to a deactivated alias is "silently discarded" and the sender is not notified, so the people writing to you will not know their messages are going nowhere.
Firefox Relay answers the question directly in its FAQ. If you downgrade from Relay Premium, mail keeps arriving: "you'll still receive emails forwarded through your custom email masks." You cannot create new masks on your custom subdomain, you cannot create any new masks at all if you already have more than 5, and "you'll also lose the ability to reply to forwarded messages." Forwarding survives; replying does not. That is close to our own shape, with one difference: Relay's custom subdomains live under mozmail.com, so there is no domain you could point elsewhere.
Apple's Hide My Email is where the documentation runs out. Apple's page on downgrading or cancelling iCloud+ says that on the free plan "you will no longer have access to iCloud+ features like Hide My Email," and stops there. We could not find an Apple support page that states what happens to mail sent to your existing Hide My Email addresses after a lapse. The docs do not say, and we are not going to guess on Apple's behalf. If you depend on Hide My Email, that unanswered question is worth putting to Apple support before your renewal date rather than after it.
Fastmail's masked email sits inside a paid mailbox, so a lapse is a different kind of event: it is your whole mailbox that lapses, not an add-on. Fastmail's expired-subscriptions page is admirably specific about the timeline. "If the subscription is not renewed soon, sending and receiving email will be disabled for your account." A few weeks later, access to the account is disabled, and eventually "the entire account will be deleted, including all stored messages." The same page notes that once an account is deleted, "the username and any addresses on the account can be re-used." Fastmail's masked email documentation does not treat lapsed subscriptions separately, so the account-wide rules are the answer: masked addresses stop receiving along with the rest of the mailbox, and after deletion those addresses can eventually belong to someone else.
DuckDuckGo's Email Protection deserves a mention precisely because the lapse question does not apply. Its help pages describe it as "a free email forwarding service," so there is no card to expire. The risk profile is different rather than absent: with a free service the question becomes what happens if the service changes or closes, and that is answered by policy and goodwill rather than by anything you control. Firefox Relay, to its credit, addresses the same scenario in its own FAQ, promising advance notice if the service ever shuts down.
What survives a lapse, at a glance
- YeyMail: everything kept; shared-domain aliases forward up to 20 messages a day; custom domains pause and senders see delivery failures; replies stop; the kill switch keeps working.
- SimpleLogin: everything kept and working, including custom domains; no new aliases beyond 10; no new domains, directories or mailboxes.
- addy.io: aliases on paid-only domains, custom domains, and shared-domain aliases beyond 10 are deactivated; mail to them is silently discarded; automatic restoration if you return within 90 days.
- Firefox Relay: existing masks keep forwarding, including custom subdomain masks; no new masks beyond 5; replies stop.
- Apple Hide My Email: the documentation says you lose access to the feature and does not say what happens to mail sent to existing addresses.
- Fastmail: receiving stops soon after expiry, and the account, masked addresses included, is eventually deleted; the addresses can then be re-used.
Two cautions about that list. Policies change, and a blog post cannot update itself; the source pages listed at the end are the live authority, and this audit is dated August 2026. And a documented policy is a statement of intent, not usually a contractual promise; if an alias stands between you and your bank, it is worth reading the provider's terms of service as well as its FAQ before you rely on either.
The escape hatch no policy can revoke
There is one arrangement in which none of these policies can hold your mail hostage: aliases on a domain you own. A provider's shared domain belongs to the provider forever. Your own domain belongs to you, and its MX records, the DNS entries that say where its mail should be delivered, can be pointed at any provider on any day, for no more than the domain's annual renewal fee. Every address you ever created on it moves with it, intact, with nothing to update at any website.
That portability, not any provider's cancellation policy including ours, is the real answer to lock-in. The honest caveat is that portability is not the same as continuity. While a custom domain is paused with us, senders get delivery failures until you either pay or move the MX records, and moving them requires another provider ready to receive the mail. The domain guarantees you can always leave. It does not guarantee zero downtime while you do.
The questions to ask before you depend on anyone
Ask these of any alias provider, including us, before your addresses spread further than you can recall them:
- On the day I stop paying, does mail to my existing aliases keep being delivered, and for how long?
- Is anything ever deleted, and after how long?
- When an alias stops receiving, does the sender get a delivery failure, or does the mail vanish silently?
- Can I still switch a leaked alias off after my plan lapses, or is the off switch part of what I lose?
- If I use a custom domain, what happens to its mail while I am lapsed, and can I point its MX records elsewhere without asking permission?
- Is any of this written down on a page I can cite back to you in three years?
A provider with good answers will have published them already. A provider without them is asking you to trust the mood of a future pricing meeting. Either way, you are better off knowing before year three than during it.