ManyMe Provides Unlimited Email Aliases to Protect Your Privacy
Have you ever been reluctant to disclose your personal email address to an outsider, not knowing what they might do with it? Most people would respond with an emphatic “Yes! How much email will they send me? Will they sell my address to a spammer? Are they tracking my behavior and selling my data? Will they respect my wishes if I choose to unsubscribe? You never really know.
Nevertheless, we are often persuaded to reveal our primary address. Perhaps we were enticed by a discount coupon or special offer, and then regretted it as soon as the unwanted email started to arrive. Perhaps we used a secondary email account for impersonal purposes, thinking that this would protect our privacy — and it may have, for a short while, before it too became unusable due to the flood of unwanted email.
ManyMe overcomes these concerns by making it simple to disclose substitute email addresses (called aliases in “tech speak”) that both protect your privacy and give you unmatched control over the messages that reach your inbox. You can use ManyMe aliases online as well as offline, in conversation or when filling out paper forms. ManyMe automatically remembers each address and provides a list in your secure dashboard.
Email sent to an alias undergoes rigorous filtering by ManyMe, and is then forwarded to your primary email account, in any email system, so that you don’t have to manage a second inbox. As a result, senders will never know your true email identity. When you reply to a message, the process works in reverse—your reply returns to ManyMe, which replaces your primary email address with the appropriate ManyMe address, and then forwards the reply to the original sender. Once again, your true email identity is protected.
When senders use different addresses to reach you, you have new dimensions for controlling access to your inbox. For example, you now have the option of disabling an alias altogether, which immediately and totally prevents all email sent to the alias from reaching your inbox—it’s like an “instant unsubscribe,” without having to go through the standard, unpredictable process. When an alias starts to spread to new senders—ManyMe will alert you when this happens—you can “lockdown” the use of the address to those senders who have used it previously without your objection, and pre-emptively block all new senders. These simple measures, among others, enable you tightly to control the messages that reach your inbox and keep it clean.
By creating an insulating layer of protection for your primary inbox, ManyMe also delivers important advantages for email security. Messages are screened for viruses, spam, sender authentication, and your personal delivery instructions, among other things, even before they reach the protective measures implemented by your primary email system.
As your use of ManyMe becomes a standard practice, the greater the advantages become. For example, using a different alias at every site reduces your vulnerability to credential re-use attacks, in which hackers attempt to use your credentials for one account to compromise your other accounts, too. ManyMe’s unique in-message interface will also help you identify “phishing attacks” by exposing messages sent to an inappropriate alias. For example, if you’ve given an alias to your bank, but a sender purporting to be your bank reaches out to you on the address that you disclosed to a different party, the sender is an impostor and the message is fraudulent.
Virtually everything that we do online is tracked by someone. If you seek a degree of privacy in this surveillance economy, save your personal email address for family and friends, and use ManyMe aliases for everything else.