Lawyers appreciate that many of our security threats today come directly into our inboxes. In addition, spam that is not trapped by a spam filter wastes your valuable time. Despite this, we often give out our email addresses freely.

You may not be familiar with email masking, but it is a useful email management tool. When you share your email address, you don’t know if you will receive a single email or be added to a collection of lawyer email addresses for sale on the dark web.

Several services provide email masking, including DuckDuckGo Email Protection, Proton Mail, Firefox Relay by Mozilla, FastMail and Addy.io. Apple iCloud+ premium subscription offers a “Hide My Email” feature that lets users generate unique, random email addresses.

“One Tech Tip: Don’t give your email to strangers, use a decoy address instead” is a comprehensive piece on the topic by Kelvin Chan. He has some great tips.

“The idea behind email masking is simple,” he writes. “The masking service gives you a randomized address you can use as a decoy instead of your actual email. It can be a series of unrelated words, or a string of letters and numbers. When someone sends a message to the burner email, it will be automatically routed to your address without anyone knowing.”

The free email masking services rarely allow for a reply, which is fine for newsletter subscriptions but a problem if you use the alias to purchase something online and the site needs to contact you about an issue.