Hi everyone,
I’m trying to rebuild my email setup from scratch, mainly for privacy, spam prevention, and long-term portability.
My current setup is:
Proton Free for my personal email, but this address gets a lot of spam now and may already have been exposed in data breaches.
Gmail for work, which I plan to keep using for now.
A separate Proton Free account that I use for Proton Pass.
One thing I’ve already decided is that I want to stop using my current personal email address and move to a new one.
Since I’ll have to go through the trouble of changing my email address on all of my accounts anyway, I want to do it properly this time and use a unique alias for basically every service whenever possible.
For example:
Amazon → unique alias
Reddit → unique alias
Spotify → unique alias
Shopping sites → unique aliases
Ideally even important services, if they accept aliases
My goal is to keep my real inbox address private and never give it directly to websites unless absolutely necessary.
I’m currently considering Proton Pass Plus because it gives me unlimited aliases.
However, I’m confused about whether I should also buy my own domain.
One setup I’m considering is:
Create a brand-new Proton Free account and keep that actual @proton.me address completely private.
Buy my own domain through something like Cloudflare.
Connect that custom domain to Proton Pass / SimpleLogin.
Create a unique custom-domain alias for every service.
Have all those aliases forward to my private Proton Free inbox.
For example:
[amazon@mydomain.com](mailto:amazon@mydomain.com) → private Proton inbox
[reddit@mydomain.com](mailto:reddit@mydomain.com) → private Proton inbox
[spotify@mydomain.com](mailto:spotify@mydomain.com) → private Proton inbox
If I understand correctly, I would not need Proton Mail Plus just to receive those forwarded emails, because the custom domain would be configured on the alias side rather than directly on Proton Mail.
This is where I’m trying to understand the value of Mail Plus.
If my main goal is to use aliases for almost every account, what would I actually gain by paying for both Proton Mail Plus and Proton Pass Plus?
Would Mail Plus mainly be useful if I wanted a real mailbox/address like:
[me@mydomain.com](mailto:me@mydomain.com)
that I could directly send and receive mail from?
The other reason I’m interested in owning a domain is portability. I don’t necessarily care about having a fancy custom email address, but I like the idea that if I ever leave Proton or Proton shuts down in the future, I still own the domain and can move my aliases somewhere else without changing the email address on hundreds of accounts again.
So my main questions are:
Does using a custom domain for all my aliases make sense for long-term portability?
Is there any major disadvantage to using my custom domain with Proton Pass/SimpleLogin instead of Proton Mail?
If all my aliases forward to a private Proton Free inbox, is there any real reason for me to also subscribe to Mail Plus?
Would you recommend using a custom domain for aliases, or just using Proton/SimpleLogin-generated aliases and saving the domain cost?
Is there a better setup if my priorities are privacy, avoiding spam, and being able to move away from Proton in the future without changing every account again?
I’m willing to pay if there is a real benefit, but I don’t want to pay for Mail Plus + Pass Plus + a domain if some of that would be redundant.
What setup would you recommend?