If you use iCloud.com as your email service, or even if you don't use it as your primary
email service, you have it from Apple.
It's free.
You can setup aliases.
Extra email addresses that you can use for a variety of purposes.
Let's take a look at how to do this and why you might want to.
So, in order to set it up you want to go to iCloud.com in the browser.
Go to iCloud.com and you log on with your iCloud credentials, your ID and password.
Once you're in there you go to Mail.
This, of course, is the web based version of Mail and you can go and read your email
here.
Respond to email.
It's useful especially if you have to access your email not on your own computer.
But you can also go down here to Preferences and go to Accounts.
Notice you'll have information about your email address here.
You have the label that is used.
This is my iCloud email account.
The name that's associated with this account.
So you can change that to something more professional or less professional.
Whatever you want.
And the email address.
In this case it's a demo account I use for these tutorials.
You also have Add an alias.
You can see at the bottom here it says you have zero of 3 aliases.
So you can choose three aliases to use.
So I'm going to add one.
Now this is an email that's going to be something@iCloud.com.
So let me go and say garyr0001@iCloud.com.
I'll stick with my name here.
I can use a label.
Something like, say, Shopping is a good one.
So I'll use this for online shopping accounts or some account I'm setting up at a store
I've never shopped at before.
I'll hit Okay.
It's says it's created and you can see I've got it there.
I can switch between them here and I can see this email address here.
Now notice I also have the ability to disable the alias.
So right now any email sent to this email address will actually end up in my inbox just
like an email sent to my main email address.
It's an alias.
It's not a new email address.
It's not a separate account.
It's just someone can send something to you using that email address and it ends up in
your regular email address.
So I can disable it.
If I disable it what happens is if somebody tries to send me something there it will bounce.
Just like the email address doesn't exist.
So anytime I want I can disable these.
I can also delete them.
From that point on any email sent there will bounce.
So say if I'm asked to signup for something.
Just a one time thing.
I want to have a throwaway email address.
I can create an alias here.
I can use it that one time and then maybe get back whatever I'm getting back.
Because I don't trust the source maybe and I don't want to give them my real email address
now I can go in and delete and get rid of that.
Anything they try to send to that email address will no longer arrive there.
So I'll hit Done and now when somebody sends me something I'll get it here and I'll get
it, of course, in the real mail app here on my Mac.
So here's like the real Mail app.
Now let's see what happens when somebody sends me an email to that alias.
You can see it arrived here just like if I had gotten it sent to my regular address.
But, I can notice here under To: it is to that special email address.
I can easily identify these.
So it's handy say if you signed up on an online shopping site and then suddenly you get some
email from some sites you never heard of but they're using that special alias you setup.
Ah, you know where they got that from.
They got it from that shopping site.
Now you can only have three of these at a time.
So it's not like you can set a different email address for every single site you signup for.
But it is handy when you need it for a special thing or maybe just kind of keeping things
like maybe emailed newsletters or, you know, gaming accounts or something like that as
a separate email address from your primary email address.