The Utility of the Alias - David V. Kimball

Think of an alias like an alternative path to the same destination. It can apply to domain names, subdomains, and email addresses.

For example, Hashnode allows for custom URLs for FREE. If you own your own domain name, you can turn your blog into [domain].com or blog.[domain].com.
Or you can get a short URL! Like dvdv.kim. If paired with the bit.ly or similar URL shortening service, you can share and track your own branded URLs and track clicks. With bit.ly you can have the root domain forward to your website or blog (sadly this is only available to paid customers today).

Email address aliases are cool, too.

If you use a domain name, some domain registrars permit domain address forwarding. So you can setup name@[your domain name] to forward emails to your personal inbox.

If you have an Outlook account, you can go to Settings > Add an alias. If the end of your address is @hotmail.com or @live.com, you can get an @outlook.com address that goes to the same mailbox. You can create up to 10 aliases you can use to send and receive email.

After you do that, you can use inbox rules to filter messages sent to certain addresses.

For example, make an inbox rule that “when To: field = [alias address], put in [alias] folder.”

This means you can virtually manage several separate inboxes in one mail account organized by folders.

Another example is ProtonMail. You can use [email protected] and you can also accept emails to [email protected] which is much shorter. You can’t send as pm.me though unless you’re a paying customer.

Yahoo email addresses have ymail.com as an alias for any yahoo.com email address user.

With Gmail, you can create tag-based aliases that allow you to add + and whatever you’d like. For example, you could do [email protected] and you’d have a unique sign in name just for that service but it would go to your same inbox.

Gmail also has googlemail.com as a useable alias. Not sure why you’d want to use it, but you can.

Gmail has another type of support for aliases using a period . to create unique “aliases” that can be helpful. For example, if you have [email protected], you also also have [email protected] to use as an alias.

You can usually create multiple accounts on the same website using this trick, just make sure to keep straight which account uses which email address variation!