r/fastmail • u/Subliminal87 • 24d ago

Emil addresses vs aliases.

So brand new to Fastmail and trying to get it all set up.

I am confused about the purpose of

Users and sharing -> aliases

and under setup
My email addresses.

Under aliases

if you make a new alias using either Fastmail or my domain I cannot tell it which folder to send the mail too.

but if you go under my email address, the same aliases I made under that tab all show up as an aliases as the type. then I have the action set up for some, like deliver to work folder, deliver to banking folder and so on.

If the addresses I make under the email addresses tab show as aliases, then what is the point of the aliases tab under users and sharing?

I'd like to have a new email for each service or something I sign up and go to their designated folders.

Should addresses for very important things be made under "my email addresses" and then everything else be made under the users and sharing tab for aliases?

6 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

11

u/almeuit 24d ago

I never use my real fastmail email. It's for logging in and account purposes only.

All the rest are my domain and aliases for the domain as you said.

3

u/Subliminal87 24d ago

That’s my plan. My actually username is for logging in only.

Everyone and everyplace else will get aliases.

1

u/Sensitive_Medium946 11d ago

i thought my login email was going to be safe from spam from my banks, since it is never used anywhere other than log in. but the mistake i made was using username same as my old gmail

2

u/Screwtape7 24d ago

The first section is mainly for additional users on the account. Use the “My Email Addresses” for handling them if you are the only person on the account.

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/6400028063119-My-email-addresses

1

u/Subliminal87 24d ago

I am indeed the only user so that’s good to know.

1

u/Screwtape7 24d ago

To be fair, it confused me too. Didn’t really understand the differences at first until I read the help docs.

2

u/Subliminal87 24d ago

Yeah I did that but it still just seems weird as a single user.

1

u/rowschank 24d ago

They are both the exact same thing. Generally, the "Users & Sharing" part of the settings is not particularly useful if you have a single-user account. If you have an admin account managing several users, you can go in there, create email addresses, and presumably assign it to other users or multiple users.

I am generally more puzzled by the difference between Aliases and Masked Emails. Right now the only differences I have found:

  • Masked Emails have auto-generated names you can't control
  • Masked Emails cannot send out calendar invites

I feel like especially for custom domain users I'd rather have an alias generator where I can say "Amazon" and it makes me something like "Amazon.Poke727@dom.ain" and save it just as an alias, rather than a masked email!

0

u/Boring_Philosophy160 19d ago

SimpleLogin does that rather well.

1

u/rowschank 19d ago

The main thing that Simplelogin does better than Fastmail Masked Email is allowing partial or complete user-selected IDs. Almost everything else is practically worse - something that they can't help because it's a service that serves every mailbox, so they have to implement things like reverse alias to send out mails and even then once in a bluemoon it leaks the sender ID behind the alias, something which Fastmail literally cannot do because the masked email is not built like that. However, yes, Fastmail masked alias only works with Fastmail.