Review: AnonAddy

Logo (Credit: AnonAddy. Fair use.)

AnonAddy is an open source service that allows you to create anonymous email aliases. Emails arriving into these aliases will be forwarded to a real email address of your choice. Of course you can do something like this with “plus email addresses” but it’s inferior in terms of security and usability both. You can also send emails from AnonAddy aliases.

The common use case is to create a new email alias every time you register to a site or start emailing with someone new. When using shared domains, the email addresses cannot be linked together. Furthermore, when some email alias starts to receive spam, you can just simply deactivate it.

There is a quite limited free plan, so basically you have to pay 1$/3$ per month. The one dollar lite plan should be enough for most. I would even say that the lite plan is actually what makes AnonAddy more attractive than it’s very similar competitor SimpleLogin. You can make the payments with crypto.

Of course you could just host the service yourself, but then you lose the anonymity provided by sharing domains with other users. I would recommend against it, but there are good looking instructions for this as well.

I have used AnonAddy for a while now and I’m really happy with it.