Brave’s new Email Alias feature can keep websites away from your real inbox address
Brave’s new Email Aliases feature can limit email-based tracking while still forwarding messages to a user’s primary inbox.
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The new feature gives users five free aliases, with a Premium version planned later
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Your email address is one of the easiest ways for websites and advertising companies to identify you online. If you provide the same address to multiple websites, it can potentially be used to connect your activity across different services.
Brave is now trying to limit this type of tracking. Starting with desktop version 1.94, the browser has added Email Aliases, which let users provide websites with a different email address instead of revealing their primary one.
How do Brave Email Aliases work?
Once users create a Brave Account, they can generate an alias directly from an email field on a website. Any messages sent to this address are then forwarded to the primary email address connected to the Brave Account.
The website never receives the primary address. Companies can upload customer email addresses to advertising platforms such as Google, Meta, and LinkedIn to match them against existing user profiles. Since this matching can happen on company servers, browser-based tracker blocking cannot always prevent it. Aliases can also limit how widely a primary email address spreads if a website suffers a data breach.
Email Aliases setup Brave
However, Brave Email Aliases does not automatically block newsletters or promotional messages. Anything sent to the alias can still be forwarded to the primary inbox. If an alias starts receiving unwanted emails, users can deactivate it, preventing future messages sent to that address from reaching them. Brave is initially offering five aliases for free, while a Premium version and mobile support are planned for the future.
Brave is not the first browser to do this
Email aliases themselves are nothing new. DuckDuckGo Email Protection already provides private @duck.com addresses that forward messages to an existing inbox. It can also remove supported email trackers before forwarding them. Firefox Relay provides a similar service and can generate email masks through Firefox. Its free tier currently supports up to 50 masks.
Brave’s advantage here is having another privacy feature built directly into its browser. The company recently added Containers to separate accounts, cookies, and browsing sessions. Email Aliases now give users another way to keep information shared with different websites separated.
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