July 8th, 2024

Integrating Email Aliases with Bitwarden

The Bitwarden blog details using the forwarded email alias generator to create private email aliases for forwarding messages without revealing personal information. Users can safeguard their email address from misuse.

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Integrating Email Aliases with Bitwarden

The Bitwarden blog explains how to use the forwarded email alias generator feature. This tool allows users to create private email aliases to forward messages to their personal email without revealing any personal information. By using this feature, users can protect their email address from being sold or added to mailing lists when signing up for online services. The blog mentions various services that offer email aliases and explains how to set up the forwarded email alias feature with Bitwarden. Users need a Bitwarden account and an API token from their chosen email relay service to utilize this feature. The process involves creating a new vault entry, selecting the email alias option, choosing the service, and pasting the API token. By following these steps, users can generate an email alias to maintain the privacy of their personal email address while signing up for different services.

12 comments

By @toomuchtodo - 10 months

Huge! Well done to the Bitwarden team for this first class support of digital identity compartmentalization, although a bit more improvement to be made to reduce friction on the user side for plugging in alias providers (pop up to login to retrieve an API token behind the scenes vs the API token copy paste dance, with login creds Bitwarden might be storing already).

Edit: Is there a standard or API spec perhaps across email alias services for generating, listing, managing, and invalidating aliases?

(happy paying bitwarden customer, no other affiliation)

By @Ringz - 10 months

It's been like this for years. However, with one of my own domains and a catch all rule in the e-mail server. Why? From time to time, some services require that you send emails with exactly this e-mail address as the sender. And that doesn't just work with most services. Because in such a case, you have to turn exactly this e-mail address into a real account with a mailbox.

By @tamimio - 10 months

That’s great, but there’s a caveat. When I normally create a random email with my own domain as a username, I am not tied to a specific service. I can always migrate to another one without having to take any action. However, if I used this with Fastmail, for example, the generated emails are with fastmail.com or similar domains that aren’t under my control. If I wanted to migrate in the future, I would have to redo all of these randomly generated emails.

By @renewiltord - 10 months

Ah, this is nice. It brings the Apple Hide My Email functionality (though not compatibility) to all platforms, which is something I do desire since using Hide My Email makes non-Apple platforms unusable for logins.

By @niklasmtj - 10 months

Oh this is funny to see. I just posted a blog post talking about Email Aliases an hour ago without knowing about the Bitwarden announcement.

I would love to see aliases being promoted more and more by companies. In the end most companies want to get in touch with you via e.g. a newsletter. So why do they need exactly your private email and not just an email alias. In the end they're reaching the same person.

By @lygten - 9 months

This will do the same thing: curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/first20hours/google-10000-... | shuf -n 3 | tr '\n' '. | sed 's/\.$/@example.com/'

By @dlkmp - 10 months

Is this really a problem people have? I personally just use some free mail account for all low-priority stuff without push notifications enabled in my client apps.

By @stranded22 - 9 months

A shame that Apple Hide My Email isn’t available within Bitwarden. I use that occasionally and would love to have it integrated and working together.

By @NoboruWataya - 10 months

This seems to just generate a random string to go with whatever domain I have set. Personally I prefer my email aliases to be of the form `<business_name>@<my_domain>` or `<website_domain>@<my_domain>`. That way if you do start getting unsolicited email it is crystal clear who is spamming you (or has sold/leaked your data).

In fact, given it seems to just put a random string in front of a domain name you give it I'm a little curious as to why they need your API key at all - is it just to ensure that you are not creating duplicate email aliases?

By @dumpHero2 - 10 months

How do you send email or reply from the alias that you create?

By @amelius - 10 months

How is this different from Firefox Relay?

By @woldemariam - 10 months

this has to be done on every instance of where I use Bitwarden separately?

Integrating Email Aliases with Bitwarden

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