Email masks: sign up on websites without revealing your address

A disposable email alternative: a separate alias for every site. Mail arrives in your mailbox, and when spam starts, you switch the mask off. Up to 10 masks.

Why use a mask

User databases leak, and addresses get sold or handed to “partners”. An address you once gave to a shop can keep receiving unwanted mailings for years.

A mask is an extra address on one of our domains, a way to hide your email: you give the site the mask, not your mailbox. Mail sent to a mask arrives in your mailbox like any other message: it goes through the same spam filter and takes up mailbox space.

A mask is like an email alias, but it only receives. From the outside it looks like an ordinary address on our domain.

How to create a mask

Sign in to your account and open the Mail section.
In the “Sign-up masks” card, choose a domain.
In the “What for” field, write where you are signing up: “online shop”, “forum”. The field is optional, but without a label it is hard to remember six months later which mask is for what.
Press “Create a mask”. The address appears straight away — copy it and give it to the site when you sign up.

How many masks, and on which domains

A mask can be on any of our domains, not necessarily the one your mailbox is on:

alpost.ch
alpost.me
notabox.in
wpost.me
solkarion.com

Masks per mailbox: up to 10; switched-off masks count, deleted ones do not
Address: made up automatically from syllables and two digits, for example lumo.tavi38@wpost.me
Label: up to 64 characters, shown only in your account
One message: up to 25 MB, the same as for your main address

How to tell who passed your address on

Create one mask per site. Then each address is known to only one recipient, and the spam itself tells you where it came from.

If an unknown lottery writes to the mask labelled “online shop”, the address came from that shop: it was sold, shared or leaked.

The mask address is usually visible in the To field. You can build a webmail filter on it: condition “To” contains the mask address, action — move to a folder. The guide “Filters, folders and the out-of-office reply” shows how.

Switch off or delete

“Switch off” — mail to the mask is no longer accepted: the sender’s server gets a refusal, as for an address that does not exist. The mask stays on the list, and you can switch it on again.
Messages sent while the mask was off will not arrive after you switch it back on: we neither accept nor keep them.
“Delete” — the mask disappears from the list for good. Its address is never given out again: not to a new mailbox, not to a new mask, not to you. Mail sent to the old address will not reach a stranger.
A deleted mask frees a place in the limit — you can create a new one.
If you still need the site — say, it holds your orders or a subscription — switch the mask off rather than deleting it. Switch it back on, and a password reset email will reach you.

How a mask differs from disposable email

A temporary address is opened without registration and does not live long. When it goes, so do the messages and the chance to reset your password on the site.

A mask works until you switch it off or delete it. The messages stay in your mailbox, and a password reset email will still arrive a year later.

The trade-off is that you need an Alpost mailbox: a mask is part of a mailbox, not a standalone throwaway address for signing up without anything else.

What is not here

You cannot send mail as a mask. The server will not accept a message with a mask in the From field. A reply to a message you received goes out from your real address — and the site will see it.
You cannot choose a mask’s address yourself: it is made up at random. Nor can you change the address or domain of an existing mask — create a new one.
A deleted mask cannot be brought back.
There are never more than 10 masks at a time.
No forwarding to mailboxes at other mail services: mail to a mask arrives only in your Alpost mailbox.
No masks on your own domain — only on our five.
No temporary email without registration: there are no masks without an Alpost mailbox.
A mask hides only the address. It will not hide your name, phone number or anything else you type into a form on the site.