Types of email addresses and aliases
With Proton Mail, there are several main types of email addresses you can use:
- Free personal address: the personal email you signed up with (for example, alicejones@proton.me or alicejones@protonmail.com)
- Additional address (alias): based on a Proton Mail domain (like alice-work@protonmail.com) or your own custom domain(nouvelle fenêtre) (alice@alicejones.com)
- +Alias: unlimited extra addresses using the “+” sign
- Organization user address: for users in an organization with their own individual login and inbox
- Hide-my-email aliases: a unique email alias that helps hide your real email address using Proton Pass
Here we explain what these addresses are and how they differ.
Free personal addresses
A free personal address is the original email address that belongs to individual Proton Mail users.
Everyone on Proton Mail has at least one free personal address:
- The original address you signed up with, which usually ends in @proton.me or @protonmail.com (like alicejones@proton.me)
You may also have the following free addresses:
- A short version of this address ending in @pm.me (alicejones@pm.me), which you activated in settings. (Previously, it was possible for a limited time to activate your @pm.me address with a Proton Free plan to receive emails only. Now you need a paid Proton plan to activate your short address.)
- If you joined Proton before June 2022, you could get a free @proton.me address (alicejones@proton.me) for a limited time in addition to the original @protonmail.com (or @protonmail.ch) address you signed up with. This option is no longer available, but you can get a @proton.me address by upgrading to Proton Mail Plus.
- If you signed up before 2016, you also have a @protonmail.ch address.
If you activated your short @pm.me address with a Proton Free plan, you can only receive emails at that address. If you want to send emails from your @pm.me address, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
You can’t disable your free personal addresses. But if you have more than one Proton Mail account, you can merge their addresses into a single account to send and receive mail from the same mailbox.
Additional addresses
If you have a paid plan, you can create additional email addresses, also known as aliases, to send and receive mail in your Proton Mail mailbox. Note: If you’re a member of a Proton family group (Proton Family or Duo plans), only your plan administrator can create additional addresses for you.
These email addresses can use any of our domains (@proton.me, @protonmail.com, @pm.me, or @protonmail.ch). For example, if Alice Jones has the free personal addresses alicejones@proton.me and alicejones@protonmail.com, she could also create aliases like alice-work@proton.me and alice-subscriptions@protonmail.com, if these addresses are available.
Custom domain name addresses
If you subscribe to a paid plan and have your own domain name, you can create additional addresses using your domain, known as custom addresses.
For example, if Alice had a paid plan and owned the domain name “alicejones.com”, she could send and receive mail from addresses like alice@alicejones.com or newsletters@alicejones.com from her Proton Mail account.
Additional address limits
If you have a paid plan, you can create at least 10 additional addresses (including custom addresses), depending on your plan.
Note that your free personal addresses don’t count towards this limit. And custom addresses don’t count if they are disabled.
Learn more about creating and using additional addresses(nouvelle fenêtre)
+Aliases
+Aliases are a kind of sub-email address based on one of your free personal email addresses.
You can get a +alias by using the “+” symbol after the username in your email address. For example, Alice Jones (alicejones@proton.me) could get a +alias like alicejones+bills@proton.me.
There is no need to create or set up a +alias in your user settings. Rather, a new alias is created whenever someone sends you an email to that +alias. This means you can have an unlimited number of +aliases for each of your free personal email addresses.
Note that you can’t compose new messages from scratch using +aliases, but you can reply using the +alias to messages sent to that address.
Learn more about aliases and +aliases(nouvelle fenêtre)
Organization user addresses
If you have a Proton business plan (Proton Mail Essentials, Proton Mail Professional, or Proton Business Suite) and a custom domain, you can create an organization(nouvelle fenêtre). This enables multiple users to have an email address using your domain. Unlike regular custom addresses (aliases), organization user addresses have their own login and inbox.
An organization’s administrator(nouvelle fenêtre) (also known as an “admin”) can assign organization users(nouvelle fenêtre) one or more email addresses that use their custom domain (not a Proton Mail domain). For example, staffmember1@yourdomain.com, staffmember2@yourdomain.com, admin@yourdomain.com, etc.
By default, an organization user’s mailbox is “non-private”, which means any admin can read their messages and change their password.
An admin can also designate a user as “private”, which means admins don’t have access to their emails and can’t change their password. If a private user forgets their password, they must reset it using their recovery email.
Learn more about private and non-private users(nouvelle fenêtre)
Hide-my-email aliases
With a hide-my-email alias, you can keep your real email address hidden while registering on a new website, making an online purchase, or signing up for a newsletter. Unlike your primary email address, you can easily deactivate hide-my-email aliases if they’re ever revealed in a data breach or if you start receiving spam.
You can create up to 10 hide-my-email aliases with the Proton Free plan, or upgrade to Proton Unlimited to create as many as you need. You can create hide-my-email aliases from the Proton Mail Security Center.
Hide your email address behind a unique alias
Create a unique email alias and use it instead of using your @proton.me address. All emails sent to your randomly generated hide-my-email alias (such as newsletter.rand0m@passmail.net) will be instantly forwarded to your Proton Mail address.
By using an email alias, you can keep your Proton Mail address hidden while still being able to receive, reply and send emails to the sender, without even revealing your actual address. This helps protect your email address from being misused.
For example, Alice wants to make an online purchase, but she doesn’t want to receive all the marketing emails the website will send her long after her purchase. When creating an account to make her purchase, instead of using her real email address, “alice.jones@proton.me”, she can use a Proton Pass email alias like “alice.wzzsn798523@passmail.net”.
By using an alias, Alice hides her real email address from the website and is still able to receive all emails sent to her email alias directly in her inbox. If, at some point in the future, the website sells Alice’s email address and she starts to get large amounts of spam, Alice can disable the alias and stop receiving spam.
Hide-my-email aliases can easily be created from the Security center in Proton Mail. You can also use Proton Pass, or SimpleLogin by Proton.