Most people use one email address for everything: cloud storage, shopping, newsletters, banking, social media. That single address becomes a thread connecting every account, data breach, and marketing list you’ve ever been on.
When a cloud storage service gets breached — and major services have been breached repeatedly over the past decade — your email address goes into circulation. Data brokers pick it up, correlate it with other breached datasets, and add it to profiles sold to advertisers, scammers, and anyone else willing to pay.
The solution is not to use a disposable or temporary address. It’s to use email aliases.
What an Email Alias Actually Is
An email alias is a unique, forwarding address that routes incoming mail to your real inbox. You give each service — cloud storage, photo apps, newsletters, shopping sites — a different alias. When you receive mail through an alias, you reply from that alias. The service never learns your real address.
If a service is breached, only the alias for that service is exposed. You deactivate that alias, create a new one, update the account, and continue. Your real email address — and all the accounts attached to it — is unaffected.
If a service starts spamming you, you identify which alias it came through, deactivate that alias, and the spam stops. No unsubscribe links, no spam filters, no guessing.
This is the core value proposition: aliases let you control relationships with individual services independently.
The Main Services
Several mature email aliasing services exist, each with different ownership structures, pricing models, and threat models.
SimpleLogin (now owned by Proton)
SimpleLogin is the most widely discussed aliasing service and integrates seamlessly with Proton Mail. It offers a free tier with up to 10 aliases and paid plans with unlimited aliases and custom domains.
The important context: Proton acquired SimpleLogin in 2022. If you use Proton Mail, Proton Drive, ProtonVPN, and SimpleLogin together, you are routing a significant amount of your digital life through one organization. Proton operates under Swiss jurisdiction, which has strong privacy protections. But consolidation into one provider is a risk worth acknowledging — if Proton has an outage, breach, or policy change, it affects everything.
For users who want a single privacy-focused ecosystem, the Proton stack is coherent and well-regarded. For users who prefer to spread trust across multiple providers, other options may be preferable.
Addy.io (formerly AnonAddy)
Addy.io is open-source, self-hostable, and independent — not owned by a larger company. The free tier offers unlimited aliases on the addy.io domain. Paid plans add custom domains and increased bandwidth.
The trade-off is feature maturity. Addy.io’s interface is functional but less polished than SimpleLogin’s. Self-hosting is an option for technical users who want to control the entire stack.
For users who want an aliasing service that isn’t consolidated with other privacy tools they use, Addy.io is the strongest independent option.
Apple Hide My Email
Apple’s Hide My Email, included with iCloud+ subscriptions, generates random @privaterelay.appleid.com addresses that forward to your real Apple ID email. It’s deeply integrated with Safari and iOS — when you sign up for something on your iPhone or iPad, iOS can offer to generate an alias automatically.
The significant limitation: Hide My Email aliases only work with your Apple ID email as the destination. If you want the alias to forward to a non-Apple address, you can set that up, but the integration is less seamless.
For users already in the Apple ecosystem paying for iCloud+ storage, Hide My Email is effectively free and requires zero setup friction.
DuckDuckGo Email Protection
DuckDuckGo offers a similar service: a @duck.com forwarding address that strips tracking pixels and query parameters from incoming emails before delivering them to your real inbox. Unlike the other services, DuckDuckGo’s focus is more on stripping tracking from forwarded emails than on alias management per service.
It’s useful but not a full replacement for a service like SimpleLogin or Addy.io if you want per-service alias control.
Why Cloud Storage Accounts Specifically Need Aliases
Not every account needs an alias. Your bank probably knows your real name anyway; the alias doesn’t protect much. Your anonymous forum account might not even need an email address.
Cloud storage is a specific case where aliases add meaningful value for several reasons.
Breach exposure is high. Major cloud storage and sync services have experienced significant data incidents over the years. Dropbox disclosed a breach of 68 million hashed passwords in 2012. Various services have had credential stuffing incidents where attacker access to one breached database enabled access to others using the same credentials. Your cloud storage provider holds files you care about — protecting the account email reduces breach exposure.
Data broker correlation. When you sign up for cloud storage with your real email address, that address may appear in marketing data shared with partners (depending on the service’s terms), in breach datasets, or in lists purchased by data brokers. Brokers correlate email addresses across datasets to build profiles. An alias isolates each service and prevents cross-dataset correlation using your real address.
Long-term account hygiene. Cloud storage accounts often last years or decades. An email address you used to sign up for a service in the past may now be on dozens of marketing and broker lists. Aliases let you start fresh with new services without dragging old exposure with you.
Spam origination tracing. If you start receiving unexpected spam or phishing emails, an alias tells you which service was the entry point. That’s genuinely useful for understanding where your data went.
How to Set Up Aliases for Cloud Accounts
The setup is straightforward once you have an aliasing service account.
Step 1: Choose a service. For most users starting fresh, SimpleLogin (free tier or paid) or Addy.io (free tier) are the clearest starting points. If you already pay for iCloud+, Hide My Email is already available.
Step 2: Create a labeled alias. When signing up for a cloud service, create a new alias with a recognizable label — something like dropbox-personal@yourdomain.aleeas.com or the equivalent in your chosen service’s format. Some services let you auto-generate aliases from within Safari or as a browser extension.
Step 3: Use the alias everywhere for that service. Account creation, password reset, notifications — all should go to the alias. This means when you sign up, use the alias rather than your real address.
Step 4: If the service is breached or starts spamming. Deactivate the specific alias in your aliasing service dashboard. If the account is still active, generate a new alias and update the account email before deactivating the old one.
Step 5: For existing accounts. Most cloud storage services let you change your account email address in account settings. Create a new alias, update the account, confirm the change via the forwarded email, and you’re migrated.
The Proton Consolidation Question
A concern that comes up among advanced users: SimpleLogin is now part of the Proton ecosystem. If you use Proton Mail for your real inbox, Proton Drive for cloud storage, and SimpleLogin for aliases, all of these services are operated by the same organization.
Proton’s argument is that their encryption architecture means even they cannot read your data. Proton Mail uses E2EE for emails between Proton users. Proton Drive is zero-knowledge by default. SimpleLogin aliases are a forwarding layer, not primary storage.
But operational risk — outages, policy changes, acquisitions, regulatory orders — applies to organizations regardless of their encryption architecture. If Proton experiences a major service disruption, it affects your email, your cloud storage, and your aliases simultaneously.
There’s no single right answer here. For users who trust Proton and value the integration, the consolidated stack is convenient and technically strong. For users who want resilience through diversification, pairing Addy.io aliases with a non-Proton email and non-Proton cloud storage spreads the trust surface.
Password Managers Make This Practical
The practical friction with aliases is remembering which alias belongs to which service. Password managers solve this.
When you create an account with an alias, save both the alias and the generated password in your password manager. Many password managers (Bitwarden, 1Password, Proton Pass) have built-in alias generation integration — they can generate a SimpleLogin or Addy.io alias directly from the password manager’s save dialog.
This means your password manager becomes the source of truth for both credentials and the aliases used to create them. If you need to update or deactivate an alias, you can find it in your password manager alongside the account it belongs to.
What Aliases Don’t Protect
Email aliases have specific limitations worth understanding.
They don’t protect your IP address. Services can still log your IP when you log in or use the service. An alias only protects your email identity.
They don’t protect your billing information. If you pay for cloud storage, the provider knows your payment details regardless of what email address you used to sign up.
They don’t protect against services that require phone number verification. Some cloud services require a phone number at signup. Aliases address only the email vector.
They don’t anonymize your usage data. If you’re signed into a service, the service can still observe how you use it regardless of what email you used.
Aliases are one layer in a broader approach to account privacy, not a complete solution on their own.
A Practical Starting Point
If you have multiple cloud storage or photo storage accounts and you’re using your primary email address for all of them, the simplest starting point is:
- Create a free Addy.io or SimpleLogin account
- Create one alias per cloud service
- Update your most sensitive accounts — those containing medical records, identity documents, or irreplaceable personal files — first
- Update remaining accounts over the following weeks
The process takes about five minutes per account. The benefit is that a future breach of any one of those services exposes only the alias for that service, not a thread connecting every account you own.
For a cloud storage service like daftei, which holds personal photos, files, and memories, limiting what identifying information the service has — or what gets exposed if there’s ever a third-party incident upstream — is a reasonable step. An alias keeps your real email address out of breach circulation. That’s a small, durable improvement to your account security posture with almost no ongoing cost.