How to Create a ProtonMail Email Alias (All 4 Methods)

Proton Mail is one of the most privacy-respecting email providers around, and it has genuinely good alias tools built in — but “how do I make an alias?” has four different answers in Proton, and they’re easy to confuse. This guide shows you how to create a ProtonMail email alias every way the platform offers, exactly when to use each, and what each costs, so you pick the right one instead of the first one you find. Whether you want a throwaway address for a signup or a whole second identity, there’s a Proton method for it, and we’ll walk through all four with steps.

What Counts as a ProtonMail Email Alias?

Before the steps, it’s worth clearing up the terminology, because “alias” gets used loosely and Proton actually offers four distinct things under that umbrella. Each is a way to receive mail at an address that isn’t your main one, but they differ hugely in privacy and effort. When people ask how to set up a ProtonMail email alias, they usually mean one specific method without realising the others exist. Here’s the whole map:

• Plus (tag) addresses — variations of your existing address using a plus sign, like you+shopping@proton.me. Free, instant, but they reveal your real username.
• Additional Proton addresses — full, separate addresses under one account (a second identity). Paid plans only.
• Hide-my-email aliases — randomly generated forwarding addresses that completely hide your real one. This is the true privacy alias, powered by Proton’s SimpleLogin technology.
• Custom-domain addresses — addresses on your own domain (like hi@yourname.com) routed to Proton. Paid plans only.

If you’re familiar with the general concept, our explainer on what an email alias is covers the fundamentals; the sections below are Proton-specific. Let’s take each method in order, from the quickest to the most involved.

Method 1: Plus (Tag) Addresses — Free and Instant

The fastest alias in Proton needs no setup at all and works on every plan, including the free one. Plus addressing lets you add a +word after your username, and mail to that variation lands in your normal inbox. If your address is jordan@proton.me, then jordan+netflix@proton.me and jordan+bank@proton.me both reach you automatically — no configuration, unlimited variations.

How to use it:

1. Take your existing Proton address and insert + plus any word before the @ — for example jordan+news@proton.me.
2. Hand that tagged address to a website when you sign up. There’s nothing to create or enable.
3. Mail sent to it arrives in your inbox, and you can filter or block by the tag later — so if jordan+news starts getting spam, you know exactly who leaked it and can auto-trash anything sent to that tag.

The big limitation: plus addresses do not hide your real address. Anyone who receives jordan+netflix@proton.me can trivially strip the +netflix and get your true address, jordan@proton.me. Spammers and data brokers do this automatically. So plus addressing is excellent for organising mail and spotting who leaked your address, but it is not a privacy shield. Use it for low-stakes sorting, not for hiding who you are.

Method 2: Additional Proton Addresses

If you want a genuinely separate address — a distinct identity rather than a tag on your existing one — Proton lets paid users add extra addresses to a single account. These are full addresses you can send and receive from, useful for separating, say, a work persona from a personal one, or a public-facing address from a private inbox.

How to create one:

1. Sign in to Proton Mail on the web and open Settings → All settings.
2. Go to Identity and addresses.
3. Select Add address, choose a Proton domain (proton.me, pm.me) or a custom domain you’ve added, and pick the new username.
4. The address is created immediately and appears in your account; you can compose from it and receive to it.

Paid plans allow a fixed number of these: Mail Plus includes 10 addresses and Proton Unlimited includes 15 (exact figures are in the plans table below, and on the Proton Mail pricing page). The trade-off versus a hide-my-email alias is that you choose and manage each address deliberately — they’re identities you maintain, not disposable throwaways. That makes them ideal for a handful of long-lived personas and overkill for one-off signups.

One practical strength of additional addresses is that they’re first-class: you can compose from them, set a distinct display name per address, and reply so the recipient only ever sees that address, never your primary one. Many people use one as a public-facing contact address — the one that goes on a business card, a CV, or a website — while keeping their main Proton address for close contacts. Because all of them land in the same unified inbox, you get the separation of multiple identities without the hassle of logging into several accounts. The mental model to keep is scarcity: with only 10 or 15 available, treat each additional address as a deliberate identity worth maintaining, and let hide-my-email aliases absorb the endless stream of one-off signups.

Method 3: Hide-My-Email Aliases — the Real Privacy Alias

This is the method most people actually want when they set out to create a ProtonMail email alias for privacy. A hide-my-email alias is a randomly generated forwarding address — something like quiet.otter472@passmail.net — that forwards to your real Proton inbox while completely hiding your true address from the recipient. It’s the same model we cover in how email aliases work, and Proton built it on the technology of SimpleLogin, the alias service Proton acquired.

How to create one:

1. Hide-my-email aliases live in Proton Pass, Proton’s password manager (included with your account). Open Proton Pass on the web or via its browser extension or mobile app.
2. When creating or editing a login item, choose create a hide-my-email alias instead of typing an email — Proton generates a random forwarding address for you.
3. Use that alias as the email on the website. Mail to it forwards to your Proton inbox, and if it ever starts attracting spam, you disable the alias and the flow stops dead.

Because the address is random, the recipient never learns your real one — and because each alias is single-purpose, a leak is contained to that one alias and points straight at whoever leaked it. On Free and Mail Plus you can create up to 10 hide-my-email aliases; Proton Unlimited makes them unlimited. Proton’s own support guide to creating aliases has the latest walkthrough if the interface shifts.

Method 4: Custom-Domain Addresses

The most powerful option is to bring your own domain. If you own yourname.com, a paid Proton plan lets you receive (and send) mail at any address on it — hi@yourname.com, shop@yourname.com, and so on — all routed into Proton. With a catch-all enabled, anything@yourname.com reaches you, giving you effectively unlimited addresses on a domain you control.

How to set it up:

1. In Settings → All settings → Domain names, add your domain and follow Proton’s steps to verify ownership and add the DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) it provides.
2. Once verified, create addresses on the domain under Identity and addresses, or enable catch-all so every address on the domain forwards to you.

Mail Plus supports 1 custom domain and Proton Unlimited supports 3. The advantage of a custom domain is portability — because you own it, you can move it to a different provider later without changing your addresses, which no provider-locked alias can offer. The cost is that you have to own and pay for a domain and handle the DNS setup, so it’s the right call for people who want long-term control and overkill for someone who just needs a burner for one signup.

One thing to get right up front is the DNS records. Proton walks you through adding an MX record (so mail routes to Proton) plus SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records that prove your mail is legitimate and keep it out of spam folders. It’s a one-time, ten-minute job in your domain registrar’s control panel, but skipping or mistyping a record is the most common reason custom-domain mail misbehaves — so copy Proton’s values exactly and let verification finish (it can take a little while to propagate) before you rely on the domain.

Which ProtonMail Email Alias Method Should You Use?

With four options, the right choice comes down to what you’re protecting against and how much effort you want to spend. Here’s the quick decision guide:

In practice: reach for plus addresses when you just want to organise and trace mail; use a hide-my-email alias whenever privacy actually matters, which is most of the time; create an additional address for a small number of durable identities; and add a custom domain if you want portability and full control. Most people’s ideal setup is plus addresses for convenience plus hide-my-email aliases for everything sensitive.

Managing and Disabling Your Aliases

Creating an alias is only half the story — the real value shows up when one starts attracting spam and you can shut it off. Here’s how to manage each type once it exists, because a ProtonMail email alias you can’t easily disable isn’t doing its main job.

• Plus addresses can’t be “deleted” (they’re just tags on your real address), but you can neutralise one with a filter. In Settings → Filters, create a rule that sends anything addressed to, say, you+oldsignup@proton.me straight to trash or spam. The tag keeps existing, but the mail stops bothering you.
• Hide-my-email aliases are the easiest to control. In Proton Pass, open the alias and toggle it off (disable) so it stops forwarding, or delete it entirely. Disabling is usually smarter than deleting — a disabled alias silently drops new mail but stays reserved, so a spammer can’t later grab that exact address.
• Additional addresses can be disabled or deleted in Identity and addresses. Disabling stops delivery while keeping the address tied to your account; deleting frees it up entirely. Note that deleting an address you’ve used to sign up for services can lock you out of those accounts, so disable first and confirm nothing important still relies on it.
• Custom-domain addresses are managed under your domain settings; you can remove individual addresses or turn off catch-all. Because you own the domain, you retain full control regardless of what Proton does.

A good habit is to treat aliases as disposable by design: the moment one leaks or outlives its purpose, disable it without hesitation. That’s the whole point of compartmentalising — an email alias is meant to be switched off the second it becomes a liability, not nursed along. The services that abuse it lose their line to you, and your real inbox never notices.

Proton Plans and Alias Limits

How many aliases you get depends on your plan, and the differences are significant — especially the jump to unlimited hide-my-email aliases on the top tier. These figures are current as of 2026 and verified against Proton’s live pricing (Proton lists prices in euros).

The headline: even the free plan gives you plus addressing (unlimited) and up to 10 hide-my-email aliases, which is enough to start compartmentalising your signups today at no cost. Mail Plus roughly doubles your real addresses and adds a custom domain, while Proton Unlimited is the plan to choose if you want unlimited privacy aliases — it lifts the hide-my-email cap entirely. Full, current details are on the Proton Mail site.

Tips for Getting the Most From Proton Aliases

Once you’re comfortable creating aliases, a few habits turn them from a novelty into a genuine privacy system. Proton is a well-established, security-audited provider — its history is covered in Wikipedia’s overview of Proton Mail — and these practices get the most out of its tooling:

• Use one alias per service, never one alias for many. The entire benefit comes from isolation. If you reuse a single hide-my-email alias across ten sites, a leak at one exposes all ten and you lose the ability to tell who leaked. One address per signup keeps every relationship separate.
• Name your aliases meaningfully in Proton Pass. Random forwarding addresses are unguessable, which is great for privacy but hard to remember. Use the note or label field to record what each alias is for, so months later you know that quiet.otter472 was your electricity provider.
• Combine plus addresses with filters for free sorting. Even on the free plan, tagging newsletters as you+news@proton.me and auto-filing them into a folder keeps your main inbox clean at zero cost — just remember it’s organisation, not privacy.
• Reserve real addresses for real identities. Additional Proton addresses are a limited, precious resource — spend them on durable personas (work, a side project) rather than burning one on a single shopping site, which a hide-my-email alias handles better.
• Turn on a custom domain early if portability matters. If there’s any chance you’ll switch providers someday, building your addresses on your own domain from the start means you never have to re-do your signups. Provider-locked aliases can’t be moved; a domain can.

The through-line is intentionality: aliases reward a little upfront discipline with a lot of long-term control. Treat them as a system — one address per service, labelled, disabled when spent — and your inbox stays clean while your real address stays private.

Limitations of a ProtonMail Email Alias

Proton’s alias tools are strong, but they come with real constraints worth knowing before you commit — and being honest about them is more useful than a glowing walkthrough.

• You have to be a Proton user. Every method here forwards into a Proton mailbox. If your email lives at Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, or anywhere else, you can’t use Proton’s aliases without migrating your inbox to Proton first — a big commitment for an alias feature.
• The best limits are paywalled. The free plan’s 10 hide-my-email aliases are generous to start, but unlimited privacy aliases require Proton Unlimited at €9.99–12.99/month, which bundles a lot of other services you may not need.
• Hide-my-email aliases live in Proton Pass, not Mail. They’re managed through the password manager, which is powerful if you use Proton Pass and slightly disjointed if you only wanted email aliases.
• Provider lock-in. Except for custom domains, your aliases are tied to Proton’s domains — leaving Proton later means abandoning them and re-doing your signups.

None of these make Proton a bad choice — it’s an excellent, privacy-first provider, and if you’re happy inside its ecosystem, its aliases are among the best built into any mailbox. The limitations simply matter most for the large group of people who want alias protection but don’t want to move their email. That’s the gap the next section addresses.

Getting Aliases Without Moving to Proton

If Proton’s ecosystem suits you, its aliases are a great reason to stay. But plenty of people want the exact privacy benefit — a separate, disposable-style address per service that hides their real inbox — without abandoning the email they already use. That’s the entire premise of a standalone alias service like EmailAlias: you keep your Gmail, Outlook, or any other inbox, and simply layer aliases on top. Each site gets its own address that forwards to your existing mailbox, and you disable any alias that starts attracting spam.

The practical differences from Proton’s approach: it’s inbox-agnostic (works with the email you already have, no migration), it starts free with 10 aliases and unlimited-style Premium at $4/month, and it adds exposure intelligence that flags when an alias has leaked or a service was breached. It’s not open-source or self-hostable the way SimpleLogin (which powers Proton’s aliases) is — if that’s a hard requirement, Proton’s stack has the edge, and our SimpleLogin comparison and Proton Pass alternative pieces lay out that trade honestly. But if your goal is “give every site its own address and keep the inbox I’ve had for years,” you don’t need to switch providers to get it. For a wider view, our roundup of the best email alias services compares the field, and our take on whether to use your real email online covers why per-site aliases matter in the first place.

Final Thoughts

Creating a ProtonMail email alias is genuinely easy once you know which of the four methods you actually need: plus addresses for instant sorting, additional addresses for separate identities, hide-my-email aliases for real per-site privacy, and custom domains for control and portability. For most people the winning combination is plus addresses for convenience and hide-my-email aliases for anything that matters — and Proton’s free plan lets you start both today. The one honest caveat is that all of it assumes you’re inside Proton’s world. If you are, enjoy some of the best alias tooling in any mailbox. If you’d rather not migrate, a standalone alias service gives you the same core protection on the inbox you already have. Either way, the habit that pays off is the same: stop handing your real address to every website, and give each one an alias you can switch off.

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