Mask Your Email Address

Back in the early days of the Internet, we used handles, like those used by truckers and ham radio enthusiasts, to hide our identities. We lived in relative anonymity, saying whatever nasty thing we wanted in chat rooms and forums, never worried that anyone would trace our online activities to our offline lives.

As the Web has evolved, we have turned more towards openness. Social Media connects us with our real friends who know our real names. Our email addresses have also evolved to reveal our real names.

If you want to hide your email address, yet still only check one email account, the best thing to do is create a mask for your email address. You could do this by just creating a false email address and setting a forwarding rule to your real address, or you can use a service like NotSharingMy.Info.

Enter your real email address and click Get an Obscure Email.

A message appears stating your new email address.

You can now use this address anywhere that you do not want to reveal your real address. Email sent to the address is automatically sent to your real address. It is truly that simple.
If you want a more personalized email mask, then NotSharingMy.Info requires you to invite at least three of your friends to use the service. After the invitations are sent, you can customize your address to anything you want (that is not taken).
Obviously, we wondered if this service was too good to be true. Disposable email addresses are available throughout the Web, but they are becoming detectable by the very forms they are designed to fool. So, we tried our new, masked email address against Block-disposable-email.com’s detection script.

Immediately, the address was detected as a fake.

So, while NotSharingMy.Info has a good idea, they really are not doing the job as well as they could. The service is easily detectable as a fake email provider, meaning the address will not work on many Web sites’ registration forms. In the long run, you are probably better off to create a Gmail alter ego and just forward emails to your main address.