03/27/2025

Establishing a Masked Email for Yourself

This new spin on an old practice supercharges your security

Online security used to be simple. All you needed was a good password; in the early days, you didn't need a ton of numbers, letters and special characters to achieve that goal. No need for antivirus software to verify you were logging into legitimate sites, either. Privacy also wasn't quite as fragile as it is today. Your email wasn't constantly being lost to yet another data breach.

However, as hackers and criminals get more sophisticated, so have recommendations for best security practices. Currently, experts recommend the use of unique, random passwords (and the more characters, the better), plus two-factor authentication as a strong baseline. But you can go further—and companies on the frontlines of cybersecurity are trying to make that easier.

One such step is called masked email. (You may also hear it referred to as email masks or email masking.) It formalizes a long-available feature known as email aliases as a privacy and security measure. A randomized email address is created to hide (aka mask) your true email address for an online account. Any correspondence sent to the masked email address gets forwarded to your actual inbox. The sender doesn't know about the email's final destination. They will only find out if you accidentally reply to a message as your main account.

Please select this link to read the complete article from PC World.