Most people guard their passwords carefully and then hand their email address to every website, newsletter and app that asks. That single string of text is the key that data brokers, spammers and attackers use to find the rest of your accounts. Proton Pass attacks the problem at the root with built-in email aliases — and this guide explains what they are, how to start using them and why they quietly change your relationship with the entire internet.
Your Email Address Is Your Identity
Think about what happens after you enter your email address on a shopping site. It may be sold to a marketing database, merged with other lists, attached to advertising profiles or leaked in the next breach. Because your address is the same everywhere, all of that activity links back to one identity — and because it also unlocks your account recovery, whoever controls it may eventually control your logins too.
The usual advice is to create a second email account for junk signups. In practice almost nobody maintains a second inbox properly: it needs its own password, its own security settings and its own checking routine. An alias solves the problem without the second inbox, because mail still arrives where you actually read it.
What a Proton Pass Alias Is
An alias is a random-looking address, such as a word, a dot and some characters, that forwards every incoming message to your real inbox. The website you give it to sees only the alias. Mail sent there appears in your account as if it were addressed to you, and your real address never appears in anyone's database. Proton Pass builds this directly into the vault, using the technology of SimpleLogin — the open-source aliasing service Proton acquired in 2022 — so aliases and logins are created and stored together.
That integration matters more than it sounds. A standalone aliasing service is easy to forget at the exact moment you need it: the middle of a signup form. Proton Pass puts alias generation inside the same item where the username and password are saved, so the private address becomes the default, not the exception.
Creating Your First Alias
Start with the next account you were going to create anyway. While saving the new login, choose the option to create an alias; Proton Pass generates an address instantly and stores it with the item. From then on, that website, newsletter or app has its own identity — one that can be silenced without touching anything else.
- Generate: create an alias directly from the login item while signing up.
- Receive: mail to the alias is forwarded to your real inbox automatically.
- Reply: you can respond through the forwarding system without exposing your address.
- Disable: switch the alias off at any moment; senders reach a dead end.
The free plan includes a limited number of aliases, and paid plans remove the cap, so heavy users can give every service its own address indefinitely. Either way, the mechanics are identical and take about five seconds per signup.
Tracing Leaks Back to Their Source
The quiet superpower of aliases appears the first time something goes wrong. If an address starts receiving spam, you know exactly which website leaked it or sold it — the alias is unique to that one relationship. Disable the alias and the spam ends, while every legitimate service keeps working through the aliases you did not touch.
The same logic applies to breaches. When a site is compromised, attackers obtain its users' email addresses; with aliases, they obtain a dead identifier that cannot be used to find your other accounts. Combined with unique passwords from the same vault, every account becomes an island, and a breach on one island never reaches the others.
Where Aliases Fit in Your Security Routine
Aliases complement the rest of the vault rather than replacing it. The password generator gives each account a unique secret; the built-in authenticator adds one-time codes; and the alias gives each account a unique identity. Together they mean that no two accounts share anything an attacker could pivot through — not the password, not the second factor and not the address.
Reserve your real address for the handful of relationships where it genuinely belongs: your bank if it requires it, your employer, close contacts and your account recovery settings. Everything else — shopping, newsletters, forums, downloads, trials — gets an alias. The dividing line is simple: if a service does not need the ability to find you forever, it does not need your real address.
Common Questions About Alias Habits
A few questions come up in every conversation about aliases. "What if I need to recover an account that uses an alias?" — keep using the alias, since it forwards to you and still receives recovery mail. "Do aliases look suspicious?" — they are ordinary addresses to any sender, and delivery is invisible on both sides. "Is it a hassle?" — only for the first week, after which creating a private address with every signup becomes as automatic as saving the password next to it.
The best way to understand the habit is to build it once. Open your vault, create an alias for the next service that asks for your email, and notice how little changes — except that your real address now lives in one place you control. You can start from the ProtonPass login and make every future signup a private one.
