Hardly a day goes by without news of another organization suffering a data breach involving thousands or even millions of stolen user data records. If your email information appears in the mix, your antispam utility will probably see a spike in pointless mail. Abine's free MaskMe service lets you communicate with retailers, discussion groups, and other websites without ever giving them your actual email address, so they can't lose it in a data breach (or sell it to spammers). As a bonus, it also serves as a simple password manager.
MaskMe installs as an add-on for Firefox or Chrome; support for Safari and Internet Explorer is planned. The only immediately visible sign of MaskMe's presence is a small button on the toolbar.
Levels of Service
Just after installation, MaskMe runs as a local service. Your password data stays on your PC or Mac, and you can check your masked emails by logging in to your MaskMe temporary Inbox online. That arrangement is very secure, but not nearly as convenient as just using your normal email client.
Most users will want to set up email forwarding. In this mode, MaskMe forwards each received message to your actual email address, keeping a copy in the temporary inbox for four hours in case there's a problem with forwarding. Any response to the forwarded message will be automatically tweaked to show the masked email address as the sender. Setting up an email address also lets you have MaskMe fill in your real, unmasked email address, if you desire.
Upgrading from basic MaskMe to MaskMe Online is free. Doing so lets you backup your MaskMe data to the cloud, sync between multiple PCs, and access your data from any computer.
MaskMe Premium, currently in beta, will add a number of very useful features. With a Premium subscription you can sync your MaskMe data to iOS or Android devices and make masked phone calls, so the person you call won't get your actual phone number. Even more impressive is the masked credit card feature, which lets you generate a one-use credit card for each transaction. We'll review MaskMe Premium when its beta period finishes.
Masked Email
Using MaskMe to protect your email account is really, really easy. When you click on a Web form field that asks for an email address, MaskMe pops up a tiny menu window just below the field offering to mask your email. Click the button and it fills in the field with a random email address like "7bf147ea@opayq.com" that's specific to the website in question. If you've set up email forwarding, you'll also get the option to auto-fill your real email address.
When the website sends you mail, it first hits the MaskMe online mailbox and then, assuming you've set up forwarding, moves along to your regular inbox. Here's where it gets interesting. If you ever receive a spam message to one of your masked emails, you can immediately disable that address by clicking a link in the header that MaskMe inserts into the message. You can also review your masked email addresses online and block or un-block any of them with a single click.
In testing, I found a few sites where MaskMe didn't offer to mask my email. If that happens to you, just right-click the entry field and find "Mask My Email" under the MaskMe submenu. It's also possible to enter a domain directly in the MaskMe online console and generate a masked email for that domain.
Of course, MaskMe can't do anything about spammers who've already obtained your actual email address. To get full-scale spam protection, you'd need to create a brand-new email address and remember to always, always mask it.
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