Tip
What is an alias email address? It is an alternate email address that is designed to protect your personal email address (i.e. shield your real identity). It can be used as a one-time disposable address, as a PO box for a project or to create a buffer between the real you and spammers, hackers, identity thieves, etc. You can create as many of them as you want.
The Alias Manager is accessible from 2 locations: the Main Menu and the Toolbar.
To access the Main Menu, click on the Pocket Geek Privacy logo next to your browser’s navigation bar (top right).
If you can’t find the Toolbar, go in the Main Menu and check in your Settings, under Components. You might have chosen to hide it…
The Alias Manager is symbolized by @.
Tip
While both @ icons open the Alias Manager, the Toolbar is designed to show you at a glance the information relative to the website you are currently visiting and allow quick actions. The Main Menu, on the other hand, gives you access to all the alias email addresses you have created.
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Next to each icon is a circle with a number. The number next to the @ tells you how many aliases have been saved for the website that you are currently visiting. Let’s say you are visiting acme.com, in the picture “1” means that you created one alias for Acme. |
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To access more details about your alias email address:
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Position your mouse on top of the @ → it turns green and expands
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Click on the circle with the number
The Alias Manager opens up and displays the alias (or aliases) associated to the website you are currently on. Just one in our example.
Imagine you are on the phone with a company’s representative and they ask for your email address. You might not want to provide them with your personal address as you don’t know (or trust) what they might do with it. No worries! You can open your Alias Manager to simply generate a new alias email.
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Click on the big green
button (bottom right) → It opens a new screen -
Select or enter the company’s name (and website URL if it wasn’t filled automatically)
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Click on “Generate alias”
Protecting your identity and your inbox becomes a very simple matter!
Read on to find out how to use your new alias to manage spam. You will also learn to generate an alias even more easily when registering by using the Pocket Geek Privacy Toolbar.
Not easy to remember all those unfamiliar email addresses… But don’t worry, to help you whenever you might need a specific one (to log into a website for example, as aliases can also be used as User IDs when you need an alternate email address for a login), we built-in a powerful search engine allowing you to easily find what you need.
The Alias Manager is your window into the making of your inbox: who are the senders, where did they get your address from, who shares (sells?) your information… You will be able to trace spam back to the website where you originally provided the alias email address. As you regularly check your Manager, you will find yourself in control of what is making its way into your inbox. Now you can play the game too!
You have a few cards you can play your way. You can either block the mail sent to one of your aliases from reaching your inbox or just block a rightly identified sender.
Each line in the Alias Manager corresponds to an alias email address that has been created for a company. If multiple aliases have been created for the same company then there are multiple lines, each starting with the name of that company. As soon as someone sends an email to one of the aliases, then an arrow appears next to the company name at the beginning of the line. Click on it to reveal the name of the sender and the email address the email it originated from.
By default, you will receive all the emails sent to your alias address. You can choose who can you send you emails for each alias by clicking on the drop-down menu in the status column (allow all senders/block all senders/select senders).
To select only specific senders:
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Click on the toggle at the top of the list of senders to decide whether you want block (gray) or allow (green) emails from unknown future senders that might send emails to your alias.
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Click on the toggle at the end of the line for a specific sender (it switches to gray) to block emails from that sender. Tap on it again (back to green) to start allowing emails again.
Tip
Emails sent to your alias email addresses are forwarded to your personal email address unless you decide to stop receiving them. Once an alias is deactivated, emails sent to this alias are ignored and no longer forwarded to your inbox.
Once you identified that one of your aliases is obsolete for the use you created it for (gathering travel info for a trip you already took for example), archive the alias and none of the vendors you contacted before will be able to keep on bothering you for services you didn’t ask for. Also, if one of your aliases has been compromised by a website or if you notice that it brings you more spam than joy … just archive it:
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Click on the check box next to the alias you want to archive
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Click on the
icon
To see the archived alias, click on the “Archive folder” button in the sub-header, and a list of all the aliases that have been archived will be displayed. You can then unarchive the alias and bring it back to the original list (which will allow you to allow senders back in if you want to) by clicking on the unarchive icon 
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Emails sent to your alias email addresses are forwarded to your personal inbox. When you archive an alias, emails sent to this alias are ignored and no longer forwarded to you.
Deleting an alias email address altogether is a dangerous endeavour since aliases are sometimes used as User IDs (which is a great practice to protect your accounts and your inbox, but it also means that, without these aliases, any communication relative to these accounts can't reach you). Let’s say a service you subscribed to wanted to let you know about a security breach, then they would not be able to contact you by email (even though they may think that they did because the email will not bounce back to them).
Tip
This is why we decided to retire the “Delete” option in the Alias Manager. The “Archive” feature answers the same need but with an easy recovery option. Because of this new security measure, you will see in the “Archive folder” all the aliases that you may have "deleted" while using previous versions of the product. They are still deactivated (all the senders are blocked) but it is now possible to restore the original means of communication with the service provider if needed.
Let’s say you are on an interesting website and really want to subscribe to their free newsletter. You know the caveat though: in the midst of all the interesting information you seek, you will receive tons of spams because this is how free websites work…
Unless you:
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Click on the @ in the Toolbar and then click on the
icon -
No second step, that’s it!
We generate an alias email address for you and enter it in the email address field. As easy as it sounds.
And if you ever need to remember this address (to log in to the website for example, as aliases can also be used as User IDs when you need an alternate email address for a login) look at the steps to follow below.
If you used an alias email address as a User ID to register to a website then you can easily retrieve it whenever you need to log in:
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Go to the website
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Click on the
icon. -
Click on the email address field to trigger the autofill
The alias email address you used to register is then automatically entered into the appropriate field. If you created multiple alias email addresses for one website, you will then be asked to choose the appropriate one from a list.
Tip
The actions above can all be done directly from the input fields on the website you are registering to or trying to log in. Yes, we designed an even easier way to generate and retrieve login credentials and it is hiding in plain sight in the Smartfield Icon.
Learn more about how to use the Smartfield Icon here.