“Alias”, “masked email”, “catch-all” — these words get thrown around as if they’re the same thing. They’re not, and the difference is genuinely useful once it clicks. All three let you hand out an address that isn’t your main one, but they solve slightly different problems.
Here’s the plain version.
Aliases
An alias is an extra address that delivers to the same mailbox. sales@yourcompany.eu, newsletter@yourcompany.eu and you+shopping@yourcompany.eu can all land in the same inbox, while letting you sort, filter or hand out a purpose-built address.
Use an alias when you want:
- A role address (
support@,billing@) that isn’t tied to one person. - A per-service address — give
stripe@yourcompany.euto one vendor,newsletter@to sign-ups — so you can filter by it, and see instantly who leaked or sold your address if spam starts arriving on one. - A tidy way to split one mailbox into streams without running multiple accounts.
Masked email
Masking is aliases taken to their logical conclusion: a unique, often auto-generated address for every single service, that you can switch off the moment it’s abused. x7k2@yourdomain forwards to you until spam starts — then you disable it and the sender is cut off, without touching your real address.
Masking is about privacy and control. Your true address is never exposed, every relationship has its own disposable channel, and you can revoke any of them individually. It’s the same idea as “hide my email” features you may have seen — the point is that the address you give out is never the address you actually read mail at.
Catch-all
A catch-all flips the model: instead of creating addresses ahead of time, you tell your domain “deliver anything for an unknown name to this mailbox.” Then literally-anything@yourdomain just works, with nothing to set up in advance.
Catch-all is the most convenient and the least strict. It’s brilliant for making up an address on the spot at a checkout — but because every name resolves, it can also collect more spam over time. Many people use catch-all as a net and promote the addresses they actually care about into real aliases.
Which one should you use?
- Want a clean, permanent address for a role or a stream? → Alias.
- Want a throwaway, revocable address per service, for privacy? → Masked email.
- Want zero setup and to invent addresses on the fly? → Catch-all.
Most people end up using all three: a handful of aliases for the important streams, masking for privacy-sensitive sign-ups, and catch-all as the safety net. The common thread is that you stop handing out your one real address to everyone — which is the single easiest way to keep your inbox under control. (It pairs well with getting off a phone-number-linked account, too — see “How to get an email address without a phone number”.)
Where Lettio fits
All three depend on one thing: owning your domain. On a free @gmail.com you get a little of this; on your own domain you get all of it.
Lettio gives you unlimited aliases, catch-all, and your own domain hosted in the EU, so you can shape addresses however suits you — role inboxes, per-service masks, a catch-all net — without running a pile of separate accounts. It’s all on open standards, so the addresses and their mail stay yours.
If that’s the kind of control you want over your inbox, see what Lettio includes.