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Google appears to be working on a better alias system for Gmail

Gmail users had an easy, but mostly superfluous, alias system at their disposal from the very beginning. I mentioned the trick in 2006 for the first time here on this blog. All you have to do is add +text to the username of the email address.

This looks like [email protected] then. The main idea is that sites do not see the user's main address but a temporary address. The main problem with the approach was that it was dead easy to spot the real email address. All you had to do was remove the +text part from it.

New Gmail Email Alias feature in the works

A report by Android Authority suggests that Google is working on integrating real email alias capabilities into Gmail.

The details:

  • The feature is called Shielded Email.
  • It allows users to use temporary addresses.
  • These forward emails to the user's real address.

Details are scarce at the moment. It appears that the system enables Gmail users to create temporary email addresses. These may then be used for interactions with services on the Internet. The temporary email addresses may be turned off in the Gmail app; this blocks future emails from reaching the inbox.

It is unclear right now which domain or domains the temporary email addresses will use. The following features are commonly found in other services of its kind:

  • Support for custom domains.
  • Ability to reply from a temporary email address.

Popular solutions, like the Proton-owned SimpleLogin, support lots of features that add to the functionality. The paid version supports custom domains, catch-all and wildcard domains or PGP encryption. There is also AnonAddy, another crowd-favorite.

Knowing Google, it is perfectly possible that the company is not going to launch Shielded Emails at all, as a test to select users only, or launch it only to pull it at a later point.

Closing Words

Still, the introduction of better email alias to reduce the amount of spam that Gmail users who use the feature get would be a welcome addition to the service. Most privacy-conscious Internet users are probably not using Gmail for their main email addresses, but hundreds of millions of people do.

Clearly, it is too early to tell how well the feature would be received by these. It depends to a large degree on how Google would announce it to the userbase.

Email aliases are super useful at limiting spam.

Do you use email aliases? Let me know in the comments below.

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