Multiple Email Accounts vs. Email Aliases

Most of you out there have at least two email accounts. You have your primary account for all your important stuff and the “throwaway” account for everything else.

It used to be almost a requirement to maintain two email accounts as a spam countermeasure. However these days you’re far better off using email aliases just for the convenience factor.

Most people these days don’t use an email client anymore, where it was easy to handle multiple POP and IMAP accounts. Since just about everyone uses mail in the browser now, maintaining two accounts is a pain because you either have to have two tabs open to check both accounts, or if using the same mail service have to login/logout periodically to check the second account.

Fortunately, The Big Three email providers Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail make using aliases easy so you can keep a single email session and manage your aliases with ease.

Gmail

This is by far the easiest of the three to use when you want to use an alias.

If your email address is you@gmail.com, any alias can be added in instantly just by using the plus sign (+) and your desired alias.

For example, if you send an email address to you+myalias@gmail.com, you will get the mail. The “myalias” portion can be any alias you want.

The only annoying part is that there’s no way to shut off an alias in Gmail. The workaround to “disable” an alias is to set up a filter so any mail sent to that alias is put to Trash upon arrival.

Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo!’s way of aliases is called “Disposable Addresses”, and unfortunately it’s only available if you’re a paid Yahoo! Mail Plus user.

While I appreciate they have the feature, the fact it’s only available if you pay 20 bucks a year is just stupid considering Gmail and Hotmail offer it for free.

The disposable address feature is available via Options (top) > Advanced Options (left sidebar) where you can enable/disable your aliases easily.

If I remember correctly, Yahoo! does allow alternate domains to be used other than @yahoo.com such as @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com.

Hotmail

Alias management is very easy if you upgrade to the outlook.com interface (which is free).

Click the gear icon (top right) and select “More mail settings”, and on the following page click “Create a Outlook alias”. From there you can select an alias that can be an outlook.com, hotmail.com OR live.com address. Very cool.

To the best of my knowledge, Hotmail still only allows 5 aliases, however for most people that’s more than enough.

Where privacy is concerned…

Y! Mail and Hotmail are the better of the two because you can create an address that absolutely does not contain any primary account information at all.

In the end I recommend Hotmail over Y! Mail however because Hotmail offers the use of aliases for free.