You keep your passwords secret, of course, but there's no way to keep your email address secret.
Or is there? With ManyMe, you never give out your actual email address.
Instead, you use a FlyBy address, a one-off address that's different for each merchant or other contact.
Mail gets forwarded to your actual Inbox, and replies seem to come from the FlyBy address.
If the merchant sells your address to a spammer, you just terminate the disposable email address involved (and perhaps start looking for a less-shady merchant).
ManyMe is a free service, which is a bit surprising considering the back-end infrastructure required to forward and manage mail.
The company plans to make money from a coming features-added premium edition.
Burner Mail, a similar service, costs $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year, with a very limited free edition available.
At $39 per year, Abine Blur Premium is pricier yet, but does much more.
It's a full password manager, it actively blocks sites that try to track your online behavior, and it masks credit cards and phone numbers as well as email addresses.
ManyMe, Burner Mail, and Blur forward mail to your regular email account.
StartMail, $59.95 per year, makes you create a new email account, with up to 10 alias accounts, akin to ManyMe's FlyBy addresses.
Of course, your email address is probably all over the internet already, so there's some virtue to StartMail's start-fresh plan.
Instead of creating disposable addresses, Abine DeleteMe deals with the fact that your email and other personal data are already found all over the internet.
It attempts to clear your email address and a boatload of other personal data from legitimate sites that collect such things, sending opt-out requests and checking to verify that the site removed your data.
Since it requires a certain amount of human interaction, DeleteMe costs more than the others I've mentioned, at $129 per year.
Note that while using a disposable email address keeps your actual email private, it doesn't defend your messages against snooping by a man-in-the-middle attack (or by your email provider).
For that, you need an encrypted email system like ProtonMail.
Getting Started With ManyMe
When you sign up for ManyMe, you choose a unique username.
The signup screen advises that you avoid choosing anything that might reveal your real-world identity.
Each username must be at least six characters and contain only letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens.
You also specify the real-world mail account to receive forwarded mail.
Choose carefully, as you can't change this.
If your main email changes, you'll have to start a new ManyMe account.
Note that with Burner Mail you can the main forwarding email, change the recipient for an individual burner address, or even assign multiple recipients to a single burner.
You can also install the ManyMe Helper extension for Chrome.
As I'll explain, this isn't as necessary as Burner Mail's extensions for Chrome and Firefox, or Blur's for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.
You're now ready to start using FlyBy addresses.
Each FlyBy address consists of your username, a period, and a unique identifier.
If you used Mormont for your username, a FlyBy address would look like [email protected] What's unique about ManyMe is that you don't have to register a FlyBy address online before using it.
You can make one up on the fly.
On the one hand, that's very convenient.
You could meet a sales rep at a trade show and give them your email, without giving your true address.
On the other hand, I can conceive of an attacker bombarding your account with zillions of FlyBys, each different.
Admittedly, that's very unlikely to happen.
The browser extensions for Blur and Burner Mail put an icon in the email field of web forms.
Clicking the icon lets you create and register a disposable email address.
The Chrome-only ManyMe extension can gin up a FlyBy for you, if you wish, and it shows any FlyBys associated with the current domain, but you invoke it by clicking the toolbar button.
It doesn't stick a button in the email field.
When ManyMe forwards a message to your true email address, it adds a control strip at the top.
If this is the first use of a given FlyBy, the strip has a warning at the top.
Links within the strip let you block, disable, or lock down the new FlyBy.
Disable, as it sounds, means all future mail to that FlyBy will bounce.
Block means all future mail to that FlyBy from the current sender will bounce.
Lockdown locks the FlyBy to the current sender, so any mail from another source goes to quarantine.
As with Blur and Burner Mail, you manage your account through an online dashboard.
The summary page shows the number of FlyBy addresses, quarantined messages, and total messages.
A menu down the left side offers access to History, Quarantine, FlyBys, and Attachments.
You can also click to view a list of How To videos and documents, or send an email to support.
While I learned a lot from the documents and videos, they seemed disorganized and repetitive, not like the thorough onboarding tour you get with Burner Mail.
Hands On With ManyMe
When I signed up for ManyMe, I was a bit surprised that the confirmation email sent by ManyMe included a temporary password in plain text.
That's not the best for security.
Clicking the confirmation link in that email opened the login page and filled in that password.
The password appeared in the URL for the page, so now it's exposed in the browser history.
I advise you to immediately change that temporary password.
Initially I had trouble because I used my @Daxdi email account, which is a kind of alias for the underlying @ziffmedia account.
ManyMe didn't get along with that configuration.
My company contact explained that when the Source and From fields in the message header don't match, it looks to ManyMe like someone's trying to spoof my account.
Most consumers won't have this unusual email setup, but note that responding through ManyMe to an address like mine also won't work.
The Message History page lists the most recent 100 messages, with sender, subject, and date, as well as the identifier from the FlyBy used.
You can click for more details, or to change handling of the message.
You get the same Block, Disable, and Lockdown choices seen in the control strip of a received message.
There's also an option to mark this sender/FlyBy combination as trusted.
If you do that, you'll see future messages marked as trusted in the control strip.
If you lock down a FlyBy to a specific sender, messages from any other address using that FlyBy go straight to quarantine.
ManyMe relies on Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) to detect spam and malicious messages; those also go into quarantine.
You can preview a quarantined message, or view its source, and then choose to release it from quarantine or delete it permanently.
You can click on any item in the FlyBys list to review details and permissions.
For example, you can see how many senders have used the FlyBy, how many messages, and when it was first used.
If you've used Block, Trust, or Lockdown, you can see the addresses involved.
At the bottom, you'll find stats for the senders who've used the FlyBy.
ManyMe rejects executable attachments, and treats other attachments with great caution.
It doesn't deliver them directly to your actual email.
You can click a link in the control strip to preview the attachment, or go have a look at the Attachments page.
This seems a reasonable precaution.
Premium Edition Coming
Unlike the free edition of Burner Mail, ManyMe is totally free, with no limits, as mentioned earlier.
The company plans to release a premium edition that will appeal to users by adding features.
The feature list isn't set in stone, but one possibility is the addition of a full-scale password manager.
As one of the documents points out, you know that you should use a different password for every account, but its exponentially more secure if you can use a different email address too.
Burner Mail lets you change the main forwarding address, change the recipient for an individual burner, and even add multiple recipients.
Something similar is planned for ManyMe's premium edition.
At present, ManyMe is wholly reactive, recording a new FlyBy upon receiving a message that uses it.
The premium edition will allow starting a new conversation proactively, using a FlyBy.
One of the how-to documents describes how to use ManyMe for a kind of "vacation hold" on newsletters and other non-essential email.
It's a bit jury-rigged; they suggest you go down the list and block the FlyBys associated with all such items, then trust them upon your return.
A more robust vacation hold feature is a possibility for premium users.
Worth a Try
When you use a disposable email address service like ManyMe, you keep your actual email address safe from merchants who might sell it to spammers, or otherwise misuse it.
Mail comes to your actual Inbox, and your replies seem to come from the disposable FlyBy address.
Unlike similar services, ManyMe doesn't require you to register an address before using it, so you can make one up while chatting with someone in real life.
We did find some security issues with the signup process, and ManyMe isn't compatible with certain email setups, including Daxdi's own system.
On the other hand, it's free, so if you've wondered about this kind of service, give it a try.
Many different products and services fall under the blanket category of Privacy.
Few do as many different things to shield your privacy as Abine Blur Premium, which remains our Editors' Choice in this category.
