A rose by any other name... Using aliases with your Pobox account

This article was originally published as part of the Pobox blog. Pobox was acquired by Fastmail in 2015.

Three or more aliases have always been included with Pobox accounts. It’s no wonder almost 75% of our customers use more than one alias!  (To make your personal domain as easy as possible to use with your Pobox account, you can use up to 20 aliases, and up to 100 for users with Mailstore accounts.) But if you’re used to one account = one address, you might sometimes wonder, what do people do with their aliases?

They can enhance your security

We’ve often talked about how important it is to use unique passwords for different online sites. (Your password is only as secure as the least secure site you use it on!) But what about your login?

On many websites, your login is the email address you used to register. Using unique email addresses for different sites is a great way to reduce the risk that a hack of a major online site will compromise the security of other online accounts. You can set up an alias that you use only for online logins – or use AllMail to give each website their own alias! (We also let you use plus extensions, like you+apple@pobox.com. But it is becoming more and more common for websites to forbid pluses in email addresses, unfortunately.)

Show different sides of your personality

The original use of aliases was to let you go by different addresses in different situations. You might want to include firstname.lastname@pobox.com on your resume, but just go by firstname@pobox.com with your family.

Since 1995, the idea must have caught on. Nowadays, many email programs will automatically select the address the message was sent to as the reply. (Find out how to set up different identities in Pobox’s webmail, Mac Mail, Gmail, and Outlook.com.)

Let you share the love

Aliases aren’t the same as multiple users – each account is designed to be used by one person. But they can be great to spread a little love using a personal domain and a Plus or Mailstore account. Do the 5 digits in your mom’s username make you cringe every time you send her mail? (Hey, she only signed up for Gmail this year.) Make her a delivery group, and start sending her mail to mom@yourdomain.com. Just remember, it’s still part of your account – same password and settings, spam sent there will show up in your spam reports – the whole nine yards. If you want to share your domain with someone to use as their primary account, you can always add a user to your account, or invite someone to use your domain with their own Pobox account.

What do you do with your Pobox aliases? Tell us in the comments!