AliasVault is the closest thing to us in philosophy, and it's free and open source. Both give you receive-only aliases — neither can reply. AliasVault adds a password manager with passkeys, end-to-end encryption, and the option to self-host the whole thing with Docker. We add per-alias spam attribution and leak alerts. If you want to own the infrastructure, AliasVault wins outright; if you want the service to tell you who sold your address, that's ours.
Feature comparison
| AliasVault | Don't SPAM Me | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — all current features | $0 + your domain |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✓ Docker | ✗ |
| Password manager | ✓ Passwords + passkeys | ✗ |
| Encrypted credential vault | ✓ AES-256-GCM | ✗ |
| Email aliases | ✓ Built-in mail server | ✓ Catch-all on your domain |
| Reply from alias | ✗ Receive-only | ✗ Not yet |
| Message size limit | 10 MB per message | No published limit |
| Storage | Fair use, no stated limit | — (forwards, stores nothing) |
| Forwards to your existing inbox | Aliases live in the AliasVault app | ✓ Any inbox |
| Aliases auto-create on first mail | Generated per identity | ✓ Catch-all |
| Apps | Web, desktop, mobile, browser extensions | Web, iOS |
| Per-alias spam attribution | ✗ | ✓ |
| Leak alerts naming the new sender | ✗ | ✓ |
| Disable behaviour | Alias removed | Hard SMTP 550, attempts logged |
Two products that made the same unusual choice
Almost every alias service treats replying as the headline feature. AliasVault and Don't SPAM Me both ship receive-only aliases, and both are explicit about it rather than burying it.
That's worth stating plainly because it's the thing most likely to rule out both of us. If you sell on marketplaces, deal with landlords or recruiters, or otherwise need a conversation to happen through the alias, neither product does the job and you want SimpleLogin, Fastmail or addy.io instead.
Where the two diverge is what they build around the alias. AliasVault builds a vault: the alias is one field on a generated identity, stored next to the password and passkey in an encrypted credential store. We build a monitor: the alias is a sensor that reports what happens to it.
Where AliasVault is better
- Open source and self-hostable. You can read the code and run the whole stack on your own server with Docker. That's a stronger guarantee than any promise we can make — if you stop trusting the hosted service, you can leave without trusting anyone new. We can't match it and it's the main reason to pick them.
- It's a password manager too. Passwords, passkeys, and the alias generated together as one identity. If you were going to pay for a password manager anyway, that's a whole product's worth of value at zero.
- End-to-end encrypted vault with AES-256-GCM, so the credential store isn't readable by the service.
- Broader client support — web, desktop, mobile and browser extensions, against our web app and iOS.
- Free with no domain required. Our free software still needs you to own a domain, which is a real cost and a real barrier. Theirs doesn't.
Where Don't SPAM Me is different
The mail lands in the inbox you already read
This is the practical difference day to day. AliasVault's aliases are served by its own built-in mail server and read inside the AliasVault app, which is coherent if the app is where your credentials live. We forward to whatever inbox you already use, so alias mail arrives alongside everything else and there's no second place to check.
Which is better depends on whether you want alias mail quarantined or integrated. Quarantined is arguably safer; integrated is what most people will actually keep doing.
Attribution
Neither product needs you to guess which company leaked an address, because per-service addresses answer that inherently. The difference is that we watch for it: an email and push alert naming the new sender's domain the first time an alias receives mail from someone other than the company you gave it to, and a running list of the companies responsible.
Catch-all with no creation step
AliasVault generates an alias as part of creating an identity, which is the right model when a password manager is driving. Ours are caught rather than created — you type any address at your domain into any form, on any device, with nothing installed, and it works when the first message arrives.
Disable is a hard bounce
Mail to a disabled alias is rejected with an SMTP 550 rather than accepted and dropped, which pushes mailing platforms to suppress the address themselves, and the blocked attempts are still logged. Why that distinction matters.
How to choose
| If you… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Want to self-host or audit the code | AliasVault |
| Need a password manager as well | AliasVault |
| Don't want to own a domain | AliasVault |
| Want an encrypted credential vault | AliasVault |
| Want alias mail in your normal inbox | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want alerting when an alias is passed on | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want to invent addresses with nothing installed | Don't SPAM Me |
| Need to reply from an alias | Neither — see SimpleLogin or Fastmail |
The verdict
AliasVault is a genuinely impressive project and, for a technical reader, probably the better recommendation. Free, open source, self-hostable, and it replaces a password manager as well. There is no version of this comparison where we claim to beat "you can run the entire thing yourself and read every line of it".
Pick us if you don't want to run infrastructure, you want alias mail arriving in the inbox you already read, and you want the service to actively tell you when an address has been passed on rather than leaving you to spot it. Pick AliasVault if ownership of the stack is the point.
And if you need to reply from an alias, neither of us is the answer — that's the constraint we both share and the first thing to check against your own use.
More: vs Forward Email · vs SimpleLogin · can an alias receive replies?