Email cloaking service

Question

Anybody have any suggestions for an email cloaking service, that works like Craigslist's email cloaking, but is for general use?

In other words, where you can have an email exchange with somebody from your normal email account, but the emails go through a service that cloaks your email address so the recipient can't see what your address is. They can still reply to the email, and it goes back through the service, which forwards the reply back to your real address. And so on.

I'm looking for this type of service hopefully with the following:

1. I can create and manage the aliases I use and only receive emails sent to those aliases.

2. I can use a private domain of my own.

I'm finding tons of temporary, disposable-type, instant email services, but nothing quite like what I'm describing.

Answer 1

I also did a search for this kind of software. The full Craigslist solution is of course auto-enrolling you, so you don't need to create an account anywhere, messages are just in the anonymised system by default. That seems a bit hard to do for a SaaS.

http://33mail.com seems most feature-complete.

• + It has a crippled free ad-supported version, but - not open source.
• + It doesn't expire accounts if you don't want them to.
• + They recently finally encrypted the sign-up.
• + They cloak the back-and-forth if you buy premium, i.e. you can reply anonymously.
• - They have fairly low bandwidth limits for free.

http://forward.cat is free, open source and on Github, their public service auto-expires after a week though. It's very simple to sign up, but they don't cloak the back-and-forth.

https://securemail.hidemyass.com/ uses SSL for the sign-up, but their public service auto-expires after a year.

https://BitMessage.ch is geared towards technical users, doesn't automatically turn on email forwarding and doesn't act as a middle-man (replying to a message sent to your original email address uncloaks it). It's meant to be an easy relay between Bitmessage and email, so this is not really the intended usage.

https://Gli.ph is being recommended when you search for this, but they discontinued this service. I had to sign up to find that out, so this is here as a PSA.

Answer 2

Yahoo! Mail has this feature of creating disposable email addresses in order to not reveal your original Yahoo email address from a quite long time.

Go to Settings → Security tab and then you can see option of creating Disposable Email Address. You can create any number of disposable email addresses.

The mail address consist of 2 parts. First you need to give a base name for the disposable address. It is fixed and you can give it only once, you can give your name. 2nd part is creating disposable keyword, where you can give if the disposable mail ID is for Amazon, ebay, any thing of your wish just for identification. Your disposable address will be coming as @yahoo.com address.

1st part → BarathVutukuri
2nd part → amazon
Total email address → [email protected]

The above example is just for reference. You can even use any random string for the first part, but it is not changeable once it is saved, keep that in mind.

Once the mail address is built, you can send emails through that address and also you have the option to create filters to move messages to specified folders automatically.

If you feel you are receiving spam on that email address, you can also delete that address.

You are getting a disposable address from Yahoo.com, it will be quite reliable and no need to signup for getting disposable address. I think it won't meet your second requirement of using your own private domain.

For general daily normal use, I think it will be sufficient.

Answer 3

I don't know about Craigslist's email cloaking, but from your description, I would expect that BitMessage fulfills your needs.

Answer 4

Some interesting suggestions have been mentioned. With https://Gli.ph the issue is that you have to have a pay for a cloaked email address, but you will still get a service that is US based, which is not desirable if you are concerned about your privacy.

Another alternative is https://www.protonmail.ch which allows you, for payment :(, to make multiple aliases, which will hide your main email address. Also, It is real hard (perhaps close to impossible) for third parties to access your data.

Oh and I think (not 100% sure) it also said that you can actually link your own domains if you want.

Answer 5

Elastic Email has a simple API for creating two-way anonymous email routing just like craigslist or airbnb. It uses an inbound email api to call a web-hook on your server to resolve the correct email addresses and then relays the email accordingly. It only takes a few lines of code. They have a detailed tutorial here:

https://elasticemail.com/blog/marketing_tips/how-to-build-an-anonymized-email-relaying-feature-using-elastic-email/