Keep your email addresses safe

Shield your email from the long arm of the spam

- Alex Blake

Spam is the scourge of the modern internet, and there are few people yet to be bedevilled by it. Fortunately, there are a few ways you can fight back, and one of them is through using email aliases. These are alternative email addresses that redirect to your main inbox - hand out an alias and your regular email address remains uncompromised. If an address gets spammed, most places let you quickly disable it.

Aliases aren't just useful for countering spam, either; you can use them to filter and organise your incoming messages while maintaining a single inbox, for example.

Simple and sophisticated

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create and use aliases with Gmail, iCloud and Outlook. Gmail’s method is the simplest and merely requires appending a ‘+’ symbol and an extra word to the end of your normal email address, although it does mean savvy ne'er-do-wells could suss out your real address.