I was going through some mailbox maintenance and found an old promotional email sent from SimpleLogin a few years ago. It's for a lifetime premium plan. I'd already bought it myself, but out of curiosity I clicked the old link again… and to my surprise, it still works!
They're not officially selling lifetime plans anymore, but the link still works and my friend was able to get his premium account today using it. Just replace the email address with your own:
https://account.proton.me/pass/signup?plan=passlifetime2024&…
You get lifetime premium for both Proton Pass and SimpleLogin. Personally, I don't use Proton Pass (I'm more of a Bitwarden guy), but SimpleLogin is pretty good.
For anyone who isn't technical, this probably isn't for you. For those who are technical but don't know what SimpleLogin is, it's similar to Firefox Relay, AnonAddy, or Bulc Club. As far as I know, it's the only one that offered a lifetime premium option (and obviously still available through this method), which makes it pretty good value if you think you'll use it long-term. The main idea is that it hides your real email address. That's useful not only for privacy, but also for limiting spam and making it easy to deal with data breaches.
Let's say your real email is [email protected].
Imagine you're signing up for a site like Mighty Ape. You don't really want to give them your real email, and using something like [email protected] isn't ideal because it still reveals your real address. Anyone who knows about Gmail aliasing can just spam [email protected].
Instead, you sign up using something like:
Where "blah" is a subdomain specific to your account. The email from Mighty Ape then gets forwarded to [email protected]
Then later you sign up for Trade Me using:
You don't have to create these aliases beforehand. Just type them in during signup like you would any normal email address. SimpleLogin automatically creates the alias and forwards all incoming mail to your real inbox.
Now imagine one day your [email protected] alias starts receiving spam about Viagra or crypto scams instead of emails from Trade Me.
That probably means one of two things:
- Trade Me suffered a data breach and your alias was leaked.
- They shared or sold your email to a third party.
Either way, it doesn't really matter. You simply disable that alias and the spam stops. Your real email address was never exposed.
One thing people often ask is:
Couldn't a scammer just send an email to a random alias, like [email protected]?
Yes, they could try.
But SimpleLogin lets you configure rules for automatically created aliases. For example, you could require aliases to have a certain format, such as at least five letters, followed by three numbers, then three more letters.
So instead of:
you'd have something like:
That makes random guessing much less practical.
Another nice feature is replying.
If someone from Trade Me emails [email protected], the message gets forwarded to [email protected]. When you hit Reply, the person at Trade Me still sees the email coming from [email protected]. Your real email address is never revealed.
You can also create multiple subdomains, each routing to different mailboxes.
For example, if your partner's email is [email protected], you could have:
[email protected] -> [email protected]
[email protected] -> [email protected]
Or you could even have a shared subdomain:
[email protected] -> [email protected] + [email protected]
Makes it pretty flexible depending on how you want to organize things. If you own multiple mailboxes, maybe one for Personal use and another for Work/Job specific use, then using SimpleLogin with different subdomains would be a great use case to forward emails to the right mailboxes.
You can also bring your custom domain to use, so instead of [email protected], it'll be [email protected].
Personally, I find this tool very useful. My Gmail is one of the first ever mailboxes to be created, back when I was invited to the beta. Over the years, I receive a lot of spam and semi spam. But with tools like this, among other things I use, my mailbox remains sane and near inbox zero all the time, consistently and effortlessly. So I'd recommend using it if that's what you want as well.
If you just want to try it out to understand the concept, maybe start with Bulc Club. It's free, but it's quite limited, for example it doesn't hide your real mailbox when you reply to the emails. However, it's good enough for most use cases, and is a better tool than using the Gmail aliasing trick.