Proton Mail Aliases vs SimpleLogin: Which One to Use When

Between Proton Mail and SimpleLogin, there are four different ways to change the address a sender sees, and mixing them up is the most common alias mistake in the Proton ecosystem. Plus-addressing is free and built into every account. An additional address is a permanent second identity on paid plans. A hide-my-email alias is disposable and replyable, and runs on SimpleLogin — the alias service Proton acquired in April 2022 and now ships inside Proton Pass. A standalone SimpleLogin account is the same alias engine, kept separate and usable with any inbox.

The verdict: use plus-addressing when you're filing mail inside an inbox you already trust and don't need to hide anything. Reach for a hide-my-email alias, through Pass or a standalone SimpleLogin account, the moment a service you don't fully trust needs an address. Use standalone SimpleLogin specifically when your real inbox isn't on Proton at all, or when you need more aliases, a custom domain, or catch-all routing than your Proton plan gives you.

If you're not sure which situation you're in, default to the hide-my-email alias. It costs nothing on Proton Free, it's genuinely disposable, and it's the only one of the three that protects you if you guess wrong about how trustworthy the recipient turns out to be.

Proton Mail aliases vs SimpleLogin at a glance#

All four mechanisms below now run on Proton's infrastructure. The differences that matter are cost, whether the alias can be deleted independently of your real address, and whether it works outside Proton Mail.

Where Proton's own addressing wins#

Plus-addressing costs nothing and needs no setup. Add a plus sign and any word to your username — [email protected] — and mail sent to it still lands in your normal inbox, ready to filter with a rule. There's no separate app, no linked account, and nothing that can expire or need renewing.

An additional address goes further: it's a real, permanent second identity under your own Proton domain or a custom domain you've verified, available on paid plans. Support for Proton confirms paid subscribers can create at least ten. Use it for a role-based address like [email protected] that should never disappear the way a disposable alias eventually might.

Both stay entirely inside the Proton stack. No third-party service ever sees the mapping between your real address and the one a sender uses, because there isn't one to see. That's a real advantage for anyone who wants zero extra accounts to manage.

Proton Mail's native filters (Sieve rules under the hood) match on the plus suffix directly, so filing mail by which signup form it came from takes one rule, not a whole separate app. For anyone who lives entirely inside Proton Mail's own web and mobile clients, that's a real convenience the alternatives don't match.

The honest limit: plus-addressing doesn't hide anything. Your real username is sitting right there before the plus sign, so anyone who receives one plus-address can guess or scrape the rest, and a data breach at the sender's end exposes your primary address directly. It's a filing tool, not a privacy tool — and that distinction is exactly where SimpleLogin's aliases do a job Proton's own addressing was never built for.

Where SimpleLogin wins#

A SimpleLogin alias — whether created as a Proton Pass hide-my-email alias or from a standalone SimpleLogin account — is a genuinely separate address with no visible link to your real one. Give it to a service, and if that service leaks or sells your address, the leak is the alias, not you. Delete the alias and the leak stops; your real inbox never changes.

You can still reply as if you'd sent from your own address. SimpleLogin generates a reverse alias for each sender: when a message forwards to your real inbox and you hit reply, the From header is rewritten to the alias dynamically, so the reply goes out looking like it came from the alias while your actual mailbox address stays off the wire the entire time.

Standalone SimpleLogin also does two things Proton's own tools don't. It forwards to any mailbox — Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, a work account — so you get alias protection even if you never touch Proton Mail. And its Premium tier adds a catch-all domain, meaning any address at a domain you own reaches your inbox without pre-creating it, plus a browser extension that generates a fresh alias at the exact moment a signup form asks for an email.

Premium also raises the ceiling well past what the free alias engine gives you: multiple custom domains instead of none, several subdomains for organizing aliases by purpose, and PGP encryption between SimpleLogin and your real mailbox so the forwarded copy is encrypted in transit too. The free tier already includes browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari plus iOS and Android apps, so even a non-paying account gets the one-tap alias creation, not just the forwarding.

The standalone account also has its own login to protect, separately from your Proton password, and supports TOTP and WebAuthn security keys on every tier including free. That's one more account to secure, which is the real cost of the extra flexibility — it isn't free in the setup-and-maintenance sense even when it's free in the billing sense.

How to actually create each one#

The steps differ enough between the three that it's worth walking through each once, since the settings live in different apps.

1. 1

   Plus-addressing

   Nothing to create. Type your normal address with +anything inserted before the @ ([email protected]) directly into a signup form, then build a filter on that suffix from Settings → Filters in Proton Mail.

2. 2

   Hide-my-email alias (via Proton Pass)

   Open Proton Pass, start a new login or edit an existing one, and select 'Hide my email' where it asks for an address. Pass generates a random SimpleLogin alias, links it to your Proton account, and forwards anything sent to it into your Proton Mail inbox automatically.

3. 3

   Standalone SimpleLogin alias

   Create an account at simplelogin.io (or sign in with your Proton account), then generate an alias from the dashboard or the browser extension, and point it at any mailbox you already use — Proton or otherwise.

4. 4

   Additional address (paid Proton plans)

   In Proton Mail, go to Settings → Identity and addresses → Add address, and either add another address on a Proton domain or verify a custom domain you own to create a permanent address like [email protected].

Pricing model — verify on the vendor page#

Both follow the same packaging shape: a working free plan capped at ten aliases, and a paid tier that removes the cap and unlocks custom domains. Proton bundles that paid tier into Mail Plus and Unlimited pricing as the hide-my-email feature inside Pass. Standalone SimpleLogin sells its Premium tier on its own, billed monthly or annually, independent of any Proton Mail subscription.

The detail worth knowing before you pay for anything twice: link a Proton Unlimited, Proton for Business, Proton Family, or legacy Visionary account to SimpleLogin and you get SimpleLogin Premium included at no extra charge, on top of the unlimited hide-my-email aliases already in Pass. If you're already on one of those plans, a separate SimpleLogin subscription buys you nothing you don't already have.

Mail Plus is the plan people get caught by. It's a paid Proton Mail tier, but it isn't Unlimited, so it still caps hide-my-email aliases at ten and doesn't include SimpleLogin Premium. If ten aliases feel tight, the fix isn't a Mail Plus upgrade — it's Proton Unlimited or a standalone SimpleLogin Premium subscription, billed on the usual monthly-or-cheaper-annual cycle either vendor offers.

Concretely: someone who signs up for a handful of newsletters and one or two shopping sites a month rarely burns through ten hide-my-email aliases before deleting the old ones. Someone who creates a fresh alias for every account, every trial, and every one-off form will hit the cap within weeks and is the actual target buyer for the unlimited tier on either side.

Who each is genuinely for#

The right mechanism depends less on which brand you prefer and more on what you're already paying for and how much you trust the recipient.

• Already on Proton Mail, filing mail from services you trust: plus-addressing. Zero setup, zero cost, and it works the moment you type it, with no account changes needed on either end.
• On Proton and want a role address that should outlive any one signup, on a domain you've already verified: an additional address. It behaves like a normal inbox, not a forwarder, so it survives you deleting or rotating every alias around it.
• On Proton Pass or a paid Proton plan, signing up for something you don't fully trust yet: a hide-my-email alias, created in two taps from the vault you're already using to save the password anyway.
• Not on Proton at all — Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, iCloud — but want the same disposable-alias protection without switching mail providers: standalone SimpleLogin, free tier first, since ten aliases covers most people's actual signup volume.
• Running a small team that wants a branded catch-all domain for aliases, without buying full Proton Mail seats for everyone who needs one: SimpleLogin Premium's custom-domain and catch-all support, kept separate from whatever the team's real mail platform is.
• Already paying for Proton Unlimited or a Business/Family plan and unsure whether to also subscribe to SimpleLogin: don't. The linked-account Premium entitlement covers the same alias engine at no extra cost.

A third option, honestly#

Aliases only decide whether mail reaches your real address in the first place. Once it lands — forwarded through a hide-my-email alias, a standalone SimpleLogin alias, or straight into your Proton inbox with no alias at all — something still has to sort it, and no alias service does that job. A newsletter you meant to sign up for and a cold pitch that found the same forwarding address both arrive looking identical.

AI Emaily doesn't create or manage Proton or SimpleLogin aliases — that's not the problem it solves. It's the AI email client that triages what actually lands in the inbox those aliases forward to: filtering unsolicited outreach by sender behavior rather than a single blockable address, filing by rule against a Personal Context brain you set yourself rather than a guess from your sent mail, and drafting replies in your own voice on request. If you're already routing a stack of aliases into one inbox, that's the point where a client that reads what arrives starts mattering more than the alias that let it in.

It works the same way regardless of which mechanism forwarded the mail — a Proton hide-my-email alias, a standalone SimpleLogin alias, or a plain plus-address — because by the time a message reaches the inbox, it's just mail in a mailbox connected over Gmail, Outlook, or IMAP. We build AI Emaily.