How to Keep Your Real Email Address Private (And Why It Matters)

Your email address is not just a way to receive messages. It is an identifier (a persistent, unique token that links your activity across websites, advertising networks, data broker databases, and breach dumps). Most people share it without thinking because there seems to be no alternative. MyShield is that alternative.

Why Your Email Address Is a Target

Understanding the threat requires looking at how email addresses flow through the internet economy.

Data broker pipelines

When you sign up for a retailer, an app, or a newsletter, your email address typically enters a CRM platform. That CRM might have a data-sharing agreement with an advertising partner. That partner aggregates data across thousands of clients and builds profile records (including your email address, purchase history, browsing behaviour, and demographic inferences). These profiles are sold and re-sold. By the time your address appears in a third-party marketing list, it has passed through half a dozen companies you have never heard of.

Data breaches

The Have I Been Pwned database contains over 13 billion compromised accounts from thousands of services. When a company you trusted with your email address is breached, that address (along with whatever password hash, phone number, or personal data the company held) becomes available to anyone willing to pay for it on darknet markets.

Email-based tracking

Many marketing emails contain tracking pixels: 1x1 invisible images hosted on the sender's server. When your email client loads the image, the sender's server records your IP address, your approximate location, your device type, and the exact time you opened the message. Your real address is the key that ties all these signals together across different senders.

How MyShield Protects Your Real Address

Layer 1: The alias as a shield

Every alias you create in MyShield is a fully functional email address that is entirely separate from your real one. When you give [email protected] to a website, that is the only address they ever see. Our relay forwards mail from that alias to your real inbox, but the forwarding destination is never disclosed (not to the sender, not in email headers, not anywhere).

Layer 2: Header isolation

When a message is forwarded, MyShield keeps the sender side of the conversation separate from your real inbox address. If you reply to a forwarded message from your normal mail client, your real address will usually appear unless MyShield's paid reply-from-alias flow is available for that message. On paid plans, forwarded mail can include a MyShield reply address that routes your reply back through the alias instead of exposing your real inbox.

Layer 3: Isolation per service

Because you create a separate alias for each service, a breach at one company exposes only that alias. Your real address - and every other alias - remains untouched. You delete the compromised alias, create a new one for that service if needed, and move on. There is nothing for an attacker to chain together.

Layer 4: Permanent rejection on delete

When you delete an alias, MyShield's relay begins returning 550 5.1.1 User unknown for any message addressed to it. This is a hard, permanent rejection at the protocol level. Even if a company, a data broker, or an attacker has that alias address, they cannot use it to reach you. The address is dead.

What MyShield Does Not Protect Against

Transparency matters. Here are the boundaries of what real address protection can and cannot do:

It cannot anonymise your account. When you sign up for a service using an alias, you may still provide your name, a phone number, or a shipping address. The alias protects your email identity but not the other data you share.

It cannot prevent tracking in messages you open. Tracking pixels are loaded by your email client, not by MyShield. To block pixel-based tracking, use a mail client with image-loading disabled by default (Apple Mail's Mail Privacy Protection is a good option for iOS/macOS users).

It cannot retroactively protect your real address. If you have already shared your real address with hundreds of services, those services already have it. Aliases protect future signups - for past signups, you would need to update your address within each service.

The Long-Term Picture

Email address privacy is a compounding problem. The longer you share your real address with new services, the larger the graph of companies, brokers, and databases that hold it. Once it is in a breach database, it is there permanently.

Aliases break the compounding cycle. Each new service gets a new, disposable address. If that service misuses it, the damage is contained. Your real address stays clean, fresh, and uncluttered - because no new service ever sees it.

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