Email Masking & Masked Email Addresses

Emails span our entire lives. They carry private conversations with family, friends, colleagues, and doctors. Account holders feel comfortable sharing over email because inboxes are protected by usernames, passwords, two-factor identification, and more.

However, even with these security measures, online communication always has privacy risks. The growing sophistication of email surveillance is part of the problem, as is the ever-increasing number of businesses asking for your information.

E-Commerce sites typically create special deals only available to their newsletter subscribers. Some sites don’t even let you interact with them if you don’t have an account set up. One way to access these deals without oversharing your address is through email masking.

What is Email Masking?

Email masking involves giving ‘dummy’ email addresses that all get forwarded to your primary inbox. This keeps your email address out of untrustworthy hands with lousy security or privacy policies.

Stolen emails are a big help for criminals carrying out cyber threats. With email masking, hacked businesses won’t lose your address in case of a data breach, nor can they sell it to outside marketers.

Let’s say you visit an online shoe store, and an offer pops up for 15 percent off your first order. All you have to do is give them your email and sign up for a newsletter. You want the offer but know nothing about this retailer and how it uses and protects your personal information.

You can feed the site a masked email address to hide your main account. Find an email masking service you like, such as Abine Blur, create an account, and make a custom email address. It can be anything from Discounted.Shoe.Today@gmail.com to X475AuMRvxF@hotmail.com.

Although you can craft custom handles, most services will auto-generate a randomized address through a browser extension.

You feed this generated email to the shoe retailer, and the discount code gets forwarded to your primary email. You don’t have to check dozens of fake emails; you can deactivate the account anytime.

When to Use a Masked Email

It’ll be wiser to use a masked email address more often than not. Most sites don’t need your email address to do their job and only want it so they can spam your inbox with deals. Or worse, to sell it to a third party.

As a rule, you should use a masked email with any website that isn’t vital to your life. Think online shopping, posting on forums, and other entertainment-leaning activities. These tasks don’t require frequent, long-term access to the email you provide the website; deactivating it down the line won’t hurt you.

One worry is that you’ll forget the various logins you’re using. There are two ways to address this concern:

1. Use a set alias for your secondary emails
2. Use a password manager feature

In the first option, you could always use the exact words or phrases as your address username. For example, you could use guitar.hero@recordsfinder.com each time you give out your address. This method reduces the things you must remember but is generally less safe.

In the second option, you’d automatically save all your login credentials in a secure place. Most internet browsers have this feature built-in, but third-party extensions are also available. Password managers use encryption protocols like AES as protection. These encryptions are too tricky for most hackers to break into and aren’t worth the expert’s time.

When Not to Use a Masked Email

Users should avoid using masked emails for critical financial, business, or government accounts. It’s best to create a direct link between your email and these aspects of your life, as you’ll probably need to stay in close contact with them.

Some sites can detect and block people creating accounts with a masked email. In these cases, you can opt for a premium account with your service or go the old fashion route of manually creating and managing a second email address.

How Email Masking Protects Against Common Threats

During COVID-19, phishing attacks became the favored strategy of modern cybercriminals. This is when fake emails are sent to large groups of people with a link that downloads malware or tricks them into giving away personal information. Email masking keeps these attacks out of your inbox by keeping your address out of dirty hands.

Employing email masking protects you against the following:

Identity Theft - For hackers and scammers, your email can be a gateway to the rest of your life. You’d be surprised how much people can learn from a single email lookup. Many websites use your email interchangeably with your username. This means savvy criminals only need to crack your password to access your finances, social media, or professional servers.

Data Breaches - Criminals are getting better and better at breaking into company databases. Despite this, businesses of all sizes still aren’t paying cybersecurity the attention they should. Yahoo lost the information of 3 billion users, and Target also lost card data for 40 million customers.

These are some of the largest enterprises in the world, and it’s been shown that most hackers prefer targeting small businesses. You never know hackers will target a site you visited once, years ago, and gave your email to. It’s best to keep your email out of their hands in the first place.

Disruptive Spam and Spear Phishing – Email spam ranges from a minor annoyance to a serious cybersecurity threat. Email masking keeps your inbox clean and makes it easier to locate essential emails when needed.

Most people don’t worry too much about phishing since the messages are written for mass appeal and, thus, easily identified. However, spear phishing emails are carefully crafted with an individual in mind. They use the names of family members or acquaintances to trick the recipient into a response. These are dangerous but still rely on stealing the victim’s email from another source.

Conclusion

Email masking is the same as hiring a go-between to protect your identity. The shady people you work with never know who you are and can’t trace the deals back to you.

However, keeping your email safe isn’t enough in today’s online landscape. Criminals use countless strategies to dig up your information, including investigating your social media and piecing together clues from your overall online activity.

RecordsFinder has various guides that can help you build the proper habits and keep your information secure.