Maskmail — Don’t give your address to strangers
One of the primary keys to your online identity is your email address. It is for all intents and purposes your Social Security Number for the internet, and yet we hand it out to strangers on a daily basis. That’s why we created Maskmail.
It is a widely accepted fact that your identity is bought and sold on the internet for pennies. This allows actors both relatively benign (they just want to sell you stuff) and malicious (they want to take your money, impersonate you for nefarious reasons, or manipulate how you vote in elections) to track your activity both online and in the physical world.
Most people have a single main email address and use it for everything. Even when using private browsing settings, meaning cookies are less valuable to a data broker looking to know that the same person bought an anniversary present at Macy’s and uses the dating service Tinder, most people just give the same email address to both, making the building of a highly accurate model of your activity trivial. They then sell this data to others who can and do make good financial use of it, usually to your detriment.
Another attack vector is the fact that many people use a small number of passwords. The news is filled with sites getting hacked and their password vaults being far less secure than they had promised. If you’ve used the same email and password on one site that gets hacked, it’s trivial to try that out on the top 100 sites in seconds, logging in and taking whatever data is there, including banking information, government and medical records etc.
Maskmail helps reduce this attack surface considerably.
Firstly, no two websites, apps or physical businesses will be able to map their information about you to the other, unless you give them much more information suggesting that you trust them, such as your credit card. For example, Macy’s will know you as who-dis@maskmail.net, and tinder.com will know you as no-idea@maskmail.net.
Secondly, if you do reuse passwords, one site getting hacked and exposing your password is now far less dangerous, as the hackers have no way to know what other sites or email addresses to try it with.
The great thing about Maskmail is that is makes your life simpler, not more complex. All emails are forwarded to your primary email address, e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc, you’re not maintaining hundreds of different inboxes. Our browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox make creating a new email take just a single click, and when you go back to a site, we autocomplete the email for you so you don’t need to remember it.
There are many other good practices to maintaining your privacy, such as
- Use a password manager, so you never use the same password twice
- Use private browsing mode so cookies are less useful
- Use a VPN to make your IP address less useful in tracking you
- Never log in to any 3rd party site with a social networking account
and numerous others. Maskmail works as a complement to these techniques, letting you keep using your single email inbox for convenience, while remaining anonymous.
Our promise to you is the following
- We will never use advertising. Ever. Others have promised this in the past, gotten acquired and given in after a few years. We will not. Maskmail is free to try, but we are a paid service. If you find us valuable, you’d spend the cost of a few coffees a year to maintain your account. That’s the only way we will make money.
- We will never make your private information available to anyone else. This is easy for us, since all we will know about you is your email address, nothing else. We quickly discard any data about your activity, only keeping very high level data over the long term, such as how many emails you’ve received for each email address.
- We will continue to improve Maskmail, giving you insights into how your data is being used and abused by the services you use. We aim to make your personal information worthless to everyone except you, and will continue to innovate in new ways to make this a reality.
Try Maskmail out today! You can use up to ten email addresses simultaneously for free, then it’s a small yearly fee to get an unlimited supply.
