Don’t give your information to marketers who might pelt you with spam or
even expose you to a potential hack. Use Abine Blur instead, a service
that generates a free “masked email” address, to use instead of your real
one The service will forward messages to your actual Gmail (or other) inbox and
you can cut off any future emails with one click.
Edited from an article by Jared Newman at
I started using Abine Blur about five months ago, after hearing about it
from one of my newsletter readers, and it’s since become one of my most
cherished privacy services. With masked email addresses, I don’t have to
worry about getting spammed just because I signed up for an app, made a
donation, or subscribed to some retailer’s newsletter in exchange for a
coupon. I just tell Abine Blur to stop forwarding their emails, and our
link is severed.
While the idea of avoiding spam through masked or secondary email
addresses has been around for a long time, Abine Blur stands out for being easy
to use across multiple websites, each with their own separate addresses.
It’s a simple way to protect an important part of your online privacy, yet
it seems to fly under the radar compared to flashier tools like ad
blockers or VPNs.
The main reason to use masked email is obvious: Given the chance, too
many companies will abuse the privilege of having your email address,
sending endless marketing messages without your explicit permission.
The United States doesn’t have a law like the European Union’s General
Data Protection Regulation, which requires opt-in consent for companies to
email you. In the U.S., when you turn over your email address while signing up for a
service or buying something online, that address becomes fair game for
marketing. Here, the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act does
require marketers to include opt-out mechanisms in their emails, but those
unsubscribe options can be hard to find. Besides, I’ve been on enough
seemingly inescapable mailing lists to know that the law isn’t always
followed to the letter, and unsubscribing from one list won’t help if a
company has handed your email address to a third party.
Beyond just the immediate privacy violation of having your inbox invaded,
handing out your email can also be a security risk. Just type your email
address into the long-running security checkup site Have I Been Pwned, and
you’ll likely see that it’s been involved in all kinds of security
breaches. Scammers can then use your email and any corresponding personal
information from the breach in phishing attempts, which try to trick you
into turning over even more sensitive information such as passwords or
bank account details.
In the same way that you’d change your password after a security breach,
a masked email would let you change your email address as well. If an app
or website that you use gets hacked, you can just switch to a different
masked email and dispose of the old one, and scammers would have no way of
contacting you.
Creating email addresses in Abine Blur is pretty easy. After setting up
an account, just head to the masked email menu and select “New Masked
Email.” You can then specify what you’re using the address for, which will
help you easily disable emails from that site or service later.
For each masked email, Abine Blur uses a jumble of 12 random letters and
numbers, along with one of several possible domain names, so you’ll get an
address like:
9860nu90ed5n@opayq.com or i5qpqjmc7c22@blurme.net
You can then copy the email address and paste it into any sign-up
form.
If that seems like too much trouble, Abine Blur also has browser extensions
for Chrome and Firefox. (The former is also compatible with other
Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge or Brave.) Once installed,
the extension will automatically detect sign-up forms and offer to
generate masked email addresses automatically. You can also generate and
copy email addresses through Blur’s iOS and Android apps.
After setting up a masked email, any messages to that address will arrive
in your inbox with a message from Abine Blur at the top, with a “Block” button
you can click to stop any future emails from arriving. Abine Blur’s website and
apps also have a section for blocking and unblocking addresses or deleting
your masked email addresses outright.
It’s worth noting that Abine Blur offers other privacy tools, such as
masked credit cards, masked phone numbers, and a password manager, but
some of those features require a paid subscription starting at $39 per
year. Personally, I just use the masked email feature, which is free and
has no limits on the number of addresses you can create. (On that note, if
you’re using the browser extension, I suggest clicking on the extension
button, heading to Settings > Settings for All Sites, and disabling any Abine Blur features you don’t use.)
Abine Blur isn’t the only service that can mask your email address. You
can also generate temporary email addresses with services such as
Maildrop or 10 Minute Mail, or rely on the time-worn practice of keeping a
second email address for junk. In Gmail, you can also add dots or plus
symbols to your username in email forms, then set up filtering rules so
that emails to those modified addresses don’t land in your inbox. Even
Apple now offers masked email addresses with its Sign in With Apple
feature, which you can use to create an account in some apps and
services.
But compared to those methods, Abine Blur is simpler to use. I don’t have
to worry about checking a second inbox or wasting time with Gmail filters,
and unlike Sign in With Apple, it works with virtually any app or website.
(Some sites do block Abine Blur’s email domains, but I’ve yet to be thwarted by
this myself.)
That ease of use makes me more likely to use the service in the first
place. After months of doing so, I’m wondering how I went so long without
it.
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