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I have my own domains that I use for emails and I like to create a separate email alias for each company I deal with, so that if someone starts spamming me I know who it is and can block them. There is no mailbox storage behind these, they just redirect to real mailboxes at my ISP or GMail.

I've been using mydomain.com for this and it works well, except for one thing: it takes several hours for any changes to take effect. So If I want to register on some website I need to log into mydomain.com, create the new alias, wait 3-4 hours and then go back and register. This is obviously not ideal - I'd like something more immediate. There should be no limit on the number of aliases, though and it should be quite easy to create them.

Can anyone recommend an alternative service?

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Years ago, I signed up for CJB's URL redirection service, but the best part was the email redirection. When you create the account (eg foobar@cjb.net), you could configure it to send all mail to your target address, so you don't have to create aliases in the system; you make them up on the fly. In other words, you could have *@foobar.cjb.net forwarded to foobar@isp.com. (Obviously this makes it easy to spam since you can just invent new addresses, but using it wisely usually avoids that.) Unfortunately, they recently stopped their email services, so I too am looking for a replacement. – Synetech Jun 15 '12 at 18:26

closed as off topic by Al Everett, ChrisF♦ Dec 5 '12 at 22:54

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3 Answers

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I use Google Apps. The Standard Edition is free for up to 50 users, but you get unlimited email aliases. Since you then use Gmail, you also have the same "user+tag" convention in addition to aliases, e.g. user+tag@example.com.

Administration to add aliases is over the web. I've created and then used one within minutes, so the delay is imperceptible instead of hours.

It's been working great for me for close to two years.

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@Evgeny: Ah, hmm. I wonder if that's new or I misremembered. (Sorry, in either case.) I have 5 aliases I use often and a handful more, but I use user+tag much more often than that. – Roger Pate Nov 6 '10 at 0:35
@EMP I registered my domain, say, example.com to google apps, and everything sent to [anything]@example.com is received at my inbox. I can then use filters to tag the emails i.e. mark as spam, skip inbox. Just enable the catch-all option. – Arvin Jun 9 '11 at 6:05
Yes, you can do that, but it's not what I'm after. The whole idea for me is to use a whitelist to fight spam, rather than some kind of algorithmic filtering, and the catch-all address precludes that. Google's spam filter is very good, but it's not perfect. I have had legitimate emails go into spam. – EMP Jun 9 '11 at 12:07
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I too would recommend using google apps. If you don't mind having one "base" username, the "user+tag" convention requires no additional action (other than specifying it when you supply an email address) on your part.

The downside can be in how many places you use the same root "user" account. If one site starts spamming that address your only option is to create a filter for that "user+tag" address, and this assumes that it's specified in a way that gmail can filter on. So I'd suggest limiting your duplication of a root "user" to 20 or so to reduce the chance that the remaining 19 combinations might get tainted by one spammer.

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Yes, the whole "user+tag" business is an option, but as you say, there's a bit of mucking around involved. It's workable, but it's not easy. – EMP Nov 5 '10 at 23:54
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Well, there is one now! It's called RootMX.

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