When you meet someone at a cocktail party (now that cocktail parties are back) you don’t have to commit to a relationship. You don’t even have to give your real name. “Call me Ishmael!” As for keeping your home address private, there’s always the option of a PO Box. In the digital world, splashing your email address around is sure to get you boatloads of spam. Yet, you want to communicate. Enter SimpleLogin, a service that lets you shop online and even have ongoing digital conversations, all while using a temporary email address. SimpleLogin is a comprehensive disposable email address solution that covers a range of features and is easy to use.
However, IronVest does what SimpleLogin does, and more. It also masks credit cards and phone numbers, blocks trackers in the browser, and includes a complete password manager. Among the many privacy services we've evaluated, IronVest is the Editors' Choice winner.
How Much Does SimpleLogin Cost?
You can use SimpleLogin for free, with some significant limitations. The biggest is that you’re limited to 15 email aliases, whereas paying customers have no limit, and you can’t create aliases offline. Paying customers can register any number of mailboxes while those on the free plan get just one. Advanced features like PGP encryption and custom domains aren’t available for free.
Not that SimpleLogin's paid tier is expensive. You pay $30 per year for a subscription, just a penny more than Burner Mail’s $29.99 price. IronVest goes for $39 per year, though it gives you additional features including masked credit card numbers, active Do Not Track for websites, and a password manager. StartMail offers encrypted email for your trusted correspondents and temporary email aliases to keep your actual address hidden, but you pay $59.95 for that double-barreled protection. If paying anything at all seems like too much, Bulc Club and ManyMe are both free.
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Getting Started With SimpleLogin
Signing up for SimpleLogin could hardly be easier. First, you give it your real-world email address and create a strong password. SimpleLogin sends a confirmation message to verify your address. Click the validation link and you’ve created your account.
As with Bulc Club, you get a tour when you first log in to the wholly web-based dashboard. In the tour, you learn that you’ll receive forwarded emails from aliases that you create, that you can disable an alias with a simple click, and that you can reply to forwarded emails. That’s it. You’re ready to start protecting your email privacy.
The dashboard features a menu of choices across the top: Aliases, Directories, Mailboxes, Domains, SIWSL, Settings, and API Keys. I’ll cover those below. After the menu comes a status panel that reports on the number of aliases you’ve created, forwarded messages, replies, and blocked aliases. The rest of the window hosts your aliases, each in a large rectangular panel with a collection of status indicators and controls. If the display gets unwieldy you can filter what’s shown and control the sort order.
Aliases of All Kinds
Each service providing temporary email addresses seems to use a different term for the created addresses. With SimpleLogin, as with StartMail, they’re called aliases. Bulc Club identifies them as Email Forwarders. Those using IronVest create masked emails. A ManyMe temporary address is called a FlyBy address. Not surprisingly, Burner Mail calls them burner emails.
You have two main choices for creating an alias in SimpleLogin, custom and random. A custom alias has three parts. First is a word you choose yourself to describe the alias, like “coffeeshop” or “bank-newsletter” or “jimbabwe.” Second is a five-letter random character string generated by SimpleLogin. To finish, you choose from one of seven available domains such as @aleeas.com and @slmail.me. Once you’ve created an alias you can start using it immediately.
The SimpleLogin page notes that the five-letter random string exists “to avoid a person taking all the ‘nice’ aliases like [email protected], [email protected], etc.” If you already manage your own domain, you can register it with SimpleLogin and use it for your aliases. Now you can have hello@mydomain.com! Burner Mail also supports custom domains, though enabling this feature is more complex than it is with SimpleLogin.
Like IronVest and Burner Mail, SimpleLogin can also generate random aliases. Where IronVest gives you a random string like n5x4dmghcxm0, SimpleLogin lets you choose between using random words and generating a UUID. Trying the former, I got alias names like shuckpenabenteric and midwestbepinch. The UUID option yielded 69c61d15-7a7d-4145-aeb1-1e6a3cca2776.
When you want to give an email alias to a person you’re chatting with or supply one to receive an emailed receipt from a restaurant, it’s not always convenient to whip out your temporary email app. Bulc Club and ManyMe solve that problem by letting you make up aliases on the fly, ones that become active the first time they’re used. SimpleLogin has that ability too, though it may not be immediately obvious.
To make use of this feature, you start by creating one or more Directories. Now you can make up aliases on the spot, constructing them from three parts. The first part is the directory name, and the second is the unique identifier for the new alias, perhaps “tomspub” or “salesguyjoe”. Note that the identifier can only contain lowercase characters. You separate the two parts with a forward slash, a plus sign, or an octothorpe. To finish, you add one of four permitted domains; @aleeas.com is easy to remember. The result might look like varzil#[email protected].
ManyMe FlyBy addresses work in much the same way, except your username replaces the directory name and you use a period as the separator. With Bulc Club, the username goes after the @-symbol. In both those cases, all your aliases must include the main username, where SimpleLogin lets you create multiple directories.
Reverse Aliases
If you look closely at the From address in an email forwarded by SimpleLogin, you’ll see something like this: Allrecipes - allrecipesmagazine at email2.allrecipesmagazine.com
All temporary email services that permit replies must do something similar, though it’s not always so visible. SimpleLogin goes beyond with the ability to initiate a conversation using a reverse alias. In the tile that represents an alias, you’ll notice a button titled Send Email. Clicking it brings you to a page that lists all email addresses that have been forwarded through this alias. You can also add any email address you like, thereby creating a new reverse alias. Copy the reverse alias to the clipboard, open your email client, and send a message. It will seem to come from the alias you chose, and replies will go to that alias. I sent a few such messages to my colleagues at PCMag and confirmed that it works just fine.
Clicking the More button in the tile for an alias reveals usage status, with a link to get full details. You can edit which mailbox addresses receive mail from this alias, define the display name for outgoing mail from this alias, and add it to your favorites. Finally, you can transfer the alias intact to another user of SimpleLogin. I haven’t thought of a situation where I’d want to do that, but if I did, this is the only product I’ve seen that would allow it.
Where Do the Messages Go?
By default, SimpleLogin forwards any message for an alias to the email address you used when creating your account. However, you’re free to add other mailboxes as potential targets for email forwarded from your aliases. When you create a new custom alias you can choose one or more target mailboxes. For random and on-the-fly aliases, it’s simple enough to edit the target after creation.
For full-scale email encryption, you probably want a dedicated program such as StartMail, Preveil, or ProtonMail. But if you already have a PGP public/private key pair associated with one of your mailboxes, you can import the public key into SimpleLogin.
Burner Mail has the same ability to manage multiple target email addresses, including the option to forward a single burner to multiple targets. With Bulc Club, all your emails get forwarded to the single real-world address associated with your account, though you can change that account if necessary. ManyMe is even more restrictive. Once you’ve created an account, it’s locked to the specified real-world email. If your address changes, you have to start over.
Advanced Features
When logging in to a site or service requires nothing but a password, your account is wide open to anybody who guesses or steals that password. Two-factor authentication tightens the security of your temporary emails by requiring something more than just a password. Like IronVest and Burner Mail, SimpleLogin supports two-factor authentication using Google Authenticator or a Google Authenticator work-alike. Bulc Club and ManyMe don’t support this added layer of security.
SimpleLogin goes a step beyond its competitors in the multi-factor authentication arena. In addition to the common authenticator app method, it permits authentication using a hardware security key such as a Yubikey or Google Titan.
I’ve already mentioned that advanced users can use their own domain for SimpleLogin aliases and can optionally associate a PGP key with any SimpleLogin mailbox. Users with even greater technical skills can integrate SimpleLogin with their websites or mobile apps using the Sign in with SimpleLogin (SIWSL) system.
Not surprisingly, SimpleLogin offers an Android app and an iOS app. You log in to your account in the mobile app with your username and password. Doing so generates an API key that you can manage from the main dashboard. The instructions warn to keep the keys secret. Given that each key is made of 60 random lowercase letters, that shouldn’t be hard.
If you use SimpleLogin a lot, you may want to install the browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. If you do, when you encounter a website that’s asking for an email address, you can just click to create and enter a new random alias. For more control, click the extension’s toolbar button to create a custom alias, use an existing alias, and more. As with its mobile apps, SimpleLogin uses an API key to connect with the extension.
Hands On With SimpleLogin
This product has a truly comprehensive collection of features. But do they work? I put them to the test.
For starters, I created accounts on a half-dozen websites using custom aliases and both kinds of random aliases. As a reminder, random aliases can be words such as subspecies_palatine or UUID strings such as 124eb210-c060-4a12-b8d2-1feb8de710a9. I did run into a problem on a couple of sites. For example, the Club Penguin successor site rejected all my alias attempts, saying “Email provider not recognized. Please try a popular email service.” To be fair, this site rejects many services. For example, I couldn’t use a ProtonMail address either.
I received responses from a few of the sites right away, but others took many hours. My contact at SimpleLogin suggested I might be seeing greylisting in action. A mail agent using this technique won’t immediately put through messages from an unfamiliar server. Rather, it sends a Try Again Later error code. Normal mail senders handle that by trying again later; spammers typically don’t. Whatever the cause, when I returned after the weekend all of my aliases had received responses. One in particular had so many that I quickly disabled it—a perfect illustration of the SimpleLogin in action.
Next, I tried using on-the-fly aliases. Once again, these consist of a directory name you’ve created plus a made-up unique identifier, separated by /, +, or #. According to the dashboard’s instructions, the unique identifier can only contain lowercase letters. By observation, capital letters get converted to lowercase, and digits are acceptable. I did find that some sites rejected addresses containing some of the three available separators. One site rejected them all, so it required a custom address.
I also exercised the reverse alias feature, creating emails to some of my PCMag colleagues. This test went off without a hitch.
What’s Not in SimpleLogin
Most temporary email services I’ve evaluated have a hole or two in the feature collection. Some create custom aliases but don’t let you make aliases up on the fly. Others don't let you reply to messages that arrive through an alias. Some lack two-factor authentication. And so on. SimpleLogin fills in almost all those holes—it’s truly comprehensive. The main thing it doesn’t offer is the ability to fine-tune the senders that are authorized to use a given alias.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online
With ManyMe, if a FlyBy address starts getting spam, you can lock it down to discard all mail from any source except the original. Bulc Club has a vast number of ways to tune incoming mail. You can block any email or domain from using a given forwarder, or block a domain but allow a specific email address from that domain. You can entirely block a forwarder, but then punch a hole in that block to allow one address or domain. And more.
I’m not sure how many users will expend the necessary fine-tuning effort. However, my contact at SimpleLogin says that many are requesting this feature and that it’s on their roadmap for enhancing SimpleLogin.
Comprehensive Email Address Privacy
When you use SimpleLogin, you never give a real email address to merchants, websites, and other contacts that might sell your personal information. Instead, you submit a temporary email alias, which lets you conduct an email conversation in total privacy. It’s among the most feature-complete disposable email address services we’ve seen.
IronVest's masked email system works in much the same way, though it doesn’t allow the creation of masked addresses when you’re offline. But IronVest goes further, adding the ability to mask your credit card numbers and even your phone number. It also offers an active Do Not Track system and a fully functional password manager. Its breadth of privacy-related features makes IronVest our Editors’ Choice winner for both privacy services in general and temporary email services.
SimpleLogin protects your real-world email addresses using custom, random, and on-the-fly disposable addresses. Feature-wise, it outstrips most of the competition.
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