You go to sign up for a new email address, and somewhere in the form there it is: “Enter your mobile number.” Sometimes you can skip it. Increasingly, you can’t. If that bothers you, you’re not being difficult — it’s a reasonable thing to push back on.
Here’s what’s actually going on, and how to avoid it.
Why providers ask for a number
There’s a legitimate reason and a less-comfortable one, and they’re tangled together.
The legitimate reason is abuse prevention. A phone number is expensive to obtain in bulk, so requiring one makes it harder for spammers to create thousands of throwaway accounts. That’s a genuine problem, and SMS verification is a cheap way for a big provider to reduce it.
The less-comfortable reason is identity. A phone number is one of the strongest ways to tie a mailbox to a real person. It links your “anonymous” address to a SIM registered in your name, to your other accounts that use the same number, and to a device that broadcasts your location. For a company whose business is knowing who you are, a verified number is valuable in its own right — long after it has served any anti-spam purpose.
Why it’s a privacy problem
Even if you trust the provider completely, attaching a phone number to your email quietly weakens your privacy in a few ways:
- It de-anonymises the account. An address that should be separable from your identity no longer is.
- It links your accounts together. The same number across services is a simple key for correlating everything you do.
- It becomes a recovery weak point. Numbers can be socially engineered away from you (SIM-swapping). If your email recovery depends on a number an attacker can steal, so can everything your email recovers.
- You can’t easily undo it. Once handed over, that number is in the provider’s records regardless of what you do with the mailbox afterwards.
None of this means SMS is useless — it’s fine as an optional extra login step you control. The problem is being forced to hand over a permanent identifier just to open a mailbox.
How to get email without a phone number
The good news: it’s entirely possible, and it doesn’t require anything clever.
- Choose a provider that doesn’t require one. The strongest privacy-focused email providers deliberately don’t demand a phone number to sign up — because requiring one would undercut the whole point. This is the simplest path.
- Use your own domain. When you have
you@yourname.euon a provider that hosts custom domains, there’s no giant sign-up funnel demanding a number in the first place — you create mailboxes on a domain you control. - Prefer app-based two-factor over SMS. For the login security a number would have provided, a proper authenticator app or a hardware key is both stronger and doesn’t tie your identity to a SIM. Pick a provider that supports it.
- Watch the recovery settings. Make sure account recovery isn’t quietly pinned to a phone number you didn’t want to give — a recovery email or recovery codes are safer.
Where Lettio fits
Lettio is a private, European mailbox on your own domain, and the model is different by design: you’re not funnelled through a mass sign-up that treats a phone number as the price of entry. Your mail lives on our servers in the EU, encrypted in transit and at rest, never used for ads and never used to train a model, with modern app-based two-factor rather than a SIM tied to your name.
Wanting email without a phone number isn’t paranoia — it’s just asking that your identity and your inbox stay separate unless you decide otherwise. That’s the default we think email should have.
If that’s how you’d rather do it, see what Lettio includes or read exactly what we protect.