Fastmail is a whole email provider that happens to include masking; we're a router that only does masking. If you're leaving Gmail, Fastmail is the better answer and we aren't competing for that job — $60/year buys you a mailbox, calendars, contacts, apps and Masked Email together. The two real differences in the masking itself: Fastmail generates random addresses like dog.food3495@ and we let you invent netflix@yourdomain.com as you type it, and we track which alias started getting spam while Fastmail leaves that to you.
Comparison
| Fastmail Individual | Don't SPAM Me | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $5/month, or $60 for 12 months | $0 + your domain |
| What you're buying | A full mail provider | Alias routing only |
| Mailbox, calendar, contacts | ✓ | ✗ — forwards to your existing inbox |
| Masked / alias addresses | ✓ | ✓ Unlimited |
| Address format | Auto-generated words + number | Anything you type |
| Created before first use? | Yes — generate it in settings or 1Password | No — created on first inbound mail |
| Custom domain | ✓ Supported | ✓ Required |
| Catch-all | ✓ Supported separately | ✓ How it works |
| Reply / send from the address | ✓ | ✗ Not yet |
| 1Password / Bitwarden integration | ✓ | ✗ |
| Browser extension | Via 1Password | ✗ |
| Disable an address | ✓ | ✓ — hard SMTP 550 |
| Per-alias spam attribution | ✗ | ✓ |
| Leak alerts naming the new sender | ✗ | ✓ |
| Support | ✓ Real support team |
This is not really a like-for-like comparison
Most comparisons on this site are between two alias services. This one isn't, and pretending otherwise would be misleading.
Fastmail is an email provider — where your mail lives, with its own apps, calendars and contacts. Masked Email is one feature inside it. We are not an email provider and have no plans to become one; mail arrives at your domain, we forward it, and it lands in whatever inbox you already use.
So the honest question isn't "which is better" but "are you shopping for a mailbox?" If yes, we don't compete and Fastmail is a good product at a fair price. If you intend to keep using Gmail, Outlook or iCloud and only want the masking layer, the comparison narrows to the points below.
What Fastmail does better
- You can reply and send from a masked address. We can't — it's the feature we're most often asked for and it isn't shipped. If a masked address needs to hold a two-way conversation, Fastmail does that and we do not. What that limitation means in practice
- 1Password and Bitwarden integration. Generate a masked address and a password together from the browser extension, on the signup page itself. That's a genuinely good workflow and we have no equivalent.
- It's a real company with real support. Fastmail has been doing this since the late 1990s and you can get a person on a support ticket.
- Everything in one place. One subscription covers mail hosting, the masking, and the apps. Comparing $60/year against our $0 is misleading if you'd otherwise be paying for a mail provider anyway.
- No domain necessary. Masked addresses work at
fastmail.comout of the box. We require a domain before anything works at all.
Where we differ
Addresses you name, created when you use them
Fastmail's masked addresses are generated for you — random words plus a number, in the format dog.food3495@domain.tld — and you create each one in advance, in settings or through 1Password.
Ours are catch-all: every address at your domain works, and the alias is created the first time mail arrives at it. Nothing to generate and nothing to pre-register, so you can type homedepot@yourdomain.com straight into a form on a machine where you're not logged in to anything.
The practical consequence is legibility. When spam turns up at dog.food3495@ you have to look it up to learn who sold you; when it turns up at homedepot@ you already know. Fastmail's own documentation recommends adding a description to each masked address for exactly this reason — which works, but it's a lookup rather than a glance.
The trade-off is real and worth stating: a catch-all domain accepts every address, so it can be dictionary-attacked, and a random string is harder to guess than a company name. How catch-all works
Attribution
Both services mask well. Only one keeps score: per-alias spam statistics, an alert naming the new sender's domain the first time an alias is contacted by someone other than the company you gave it to, and a running Data Sellers list built from that. With Fastmail you find out by noticing. Finding out who leaked you
Domain ownership is a smaller difference here than usual
Against DuckDuckGo or Apple, our argument is that aliases on a rented namespace die when you leave the service. That argument barely applies to Fastmail, because Fastmail supports custom domains too — masked addresses can be issued at a domain you own.
One asymmetry is worth knowing. Fastmail's documentation is explicit that if you remove that custom domain from your Fastmail account, the masked addresses at it are deleted and mail to them bounces. You keep the domain, so you can point it somewhere else and rebuild — but the addresses themselves don't survive the move inside Fastmail. With us the domain is the account, and the aliases are just whatever has arrived at it.
In practice both put you in a much better position than a shared provider domain, and this is not the line on which to pick between them. Why the domain matters
Disable is a hard bounce
Turn off an alias with us and the sender gets an SMTP 550, not silence. Mailing platforms treat repeated hard bounces as grounds to suppress an address, so the rejection does some of the unsubscribing for you, and we keep logging the blocked attempts so you can see who kept trying. Bounce versus silent drop
Who should pick which
| If you… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Want to move off Gmail entirely | Fastmail |
| Need to reply from a masked address | Fastmail |
| Want masking inside 1Password | Fastmail |
| Don't want to own a domain | Fastmail |
| Want paid support | Fastmail |
| Are keeping your current inbox | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want addresses that name themselves | Don't SPAM Me |
| Want spam attribution done for you | Don't SPAM Me |
| Don't want another subscription | Don't SPAM Me |
The verdict
If the mailbox is in play, take Fastmail — $60 a year for a full provider with masking included is good value, and we don't offer the thing you'd be giving up.
Choose us if you're happy where your mail already lives and want a masking layer in front of it that costs nothing to run, names its own addresses, and tells you which one started leaking. And if you need to reply from an alias, take Fastmail regardless of everything else here — that's a hard requirement we don't meet.
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