Signing up for a cam site, dating site or adult membership with the same email address you use for work, banking and everything else isn’t always a great idea. Adult sites can send verification emails, promotions, model notifications, password resets and sometimes quite a lot of marketing.
There’s also the simple privacy question: if a site is ever hacked or its customer database leaks, do you really want your everyday email address sitting in there?
Fortunately, you don’t need to. The easiest solution is to use an email alias, a temporary email address or a completely separate inbox for adult accounts.
Email aliases are probably the best option
For most people, I’d choose an email alias instead of a disposable inbox.
An alias looks like a separate email address, but messages sent to it are forwarded to your real inbox. The website gets the alias, not your normal address, and you can usually disable the alias later if it starts attracting spam.
SimpleLogin, now part of Proton, is one of the better-known services for this. You can create a different alias for every website and still receive everything in your normal mailbox. If you reply to a forwarded message, SimpleLogin can also keep your real address hidden. SimpleLogin
Proton also integrates this directly into Proton Pass, where you can generate hide-my-email aliases while creating accounts. Proton
Firefox Relay works in a similar way. Mozilla calls them email masks: sites get the masked address and Relay forwards the mail to your real inbox. It’s particularly handy when you want to keep receiving password resets without handing over your primary email. Firefox Relay
There’s also DuckDuckGo Email Protection, which is free and lets you generate private duck.com addresses. Messages are forwarded to your existing inbox, while DuckDuckGo removes supported email trackers along the way. DuckDuckGo
For an adult account you plan to keep, this is usually better than temporary email. You don’t lose access to the address, so you can still recover your account six months later.
Temporary email is great for accounts you don’t care about
Sometimes you just want to register, verify an email and see what’s behind the signup page.
That’s where disposable email makes more sense.
10 Minute Mail gives you a temporary inbox designed for exactly that sort of one-off registration.
Visit 10 Minute Mail
Guerrilla Mail is another long-running option that gives you a disposable address without setting up a traditional mailbox.
Visit Guerrilla Mail
And YOPmail is useful when you want a quick throwaway inbox without creating an account.
Visit YOPmail
The obvious downside is account recovery. If you buy tokens, pay for a subscription or build up an account you actually care about, using an inbox designed to disappear isn’t particularly clever.
For those accounts, use an alias instead.
You can also create a separate adult email account
The low-tech solution still works perfectly well: create another mailbox and use it only for adult sites.
A completely separate Proton Mail, Gmail or Outlook account keeps those registrations away from your normal inbox. Personally, I’d avoid using your real name in the address and wouldn’t reuse the password from any important account.
If privacy is the priority, Proton Mail is worth considering because you can combine a separate mailbox with its alias tools. Proton
Visit Proton Mail
That may be overkill if you’re registering for one cam site. If you’re regularly trying different adult sites, dating services or memberships, having a dedicated inbox starts making a lot more sense.
So which should you use?
If it’s an account you might actually want again, use an alias.
If you’re just testing a website and don’t care whether the account exists tomorrow, use temporary email.
And if you use a lot of adult services and want everything completely separated from your everyday life, create a dedicated mailbox and use aliases on top of it.
What I wouldn’t recommend is using the same email for your bank, your employer, your family and every cam site you’ve ever joined.
Apart from the privacy issue, that’s just one badly timed notification away from being awkward.
One thing an email alias won’t do
Using another email address doesn’t make you anonymous online.
A website can potentially still see things such as your IP address, browser information, cookies and whatever payment or profile information you provide.
An alias solves a much simpler problem: the site doesn’t get the email address you use everywhere else.
For adult sites, that’s already a useful improvement. It keeps marketing away from your main inbox, makes leaked databases less personally revealing and lets you shut off an address if a site becomes annoying.
And unlike a fake sense of complete anonymity, that’s a privacy benefit you can actually use.