Masked addresses

A masked address is a random address, such as x7k2m9qa4d@masked.example.com, that a person hands out instead of their own: one for a shop, another for a newsletter. Mail to it arrives in their inbox, marked with the label they gave it. When an address starts getting spam or has done its job, they pause it or delete it, and their real address was never given out.

Turning them on

Masked addresses are off until the organisation turns them on. An administrator chooses the domain they are made at, one of the organisation’s own domains, and how many each person may have:

vsx admin patch tenants/1/settings masked.domain=masked.example.com masked.most=50 masked.allowed=on

A domain kept for masked addresses alone makes it plain to everybody that an address there is one. Its DNS records must be in place as for any domain; see Domains and accounts.

Turning masked addresses off again stops new ones being made. Those already made keep working until their owners delete them.

Making and using one

Each person manages their own on the page /account/masked-addresses of the mail server, for example https://mail.example.com/account/masked-addresses, signed in the same way as for app passwords:

• New masked address makes one, with a label of your choosing (“shop sign-up”).
• Pause refuses mail to it until you choose Resume.
• Delete ends it. A deleted address is never made again, for you or anybody else.

Mail to a masked address arrives in your inbox with the header X-Versealx-Masked: holding its label, so a rule can file it. A sender writing to a paused or deleted address gets the same answer as for an address that never existed, so nothing tells them it once did.

To reply from a masked address, add it as a sending address in your mail app and choose it as the From of your reply. Mail sent from it carries none of your real addresses in any header, bounces come back to the masked address, and it is signed with the masked domain’s DKIM key. Nobody else in the organisation can send from your masked addresses.

What administrators see

Administrators see how many masked addresses each person has, never the addresses or their labels. Nobody but the person, the server’s operator included, can list, change or send from them, and the audit log records that one was made, paused or deleted without saying which.

On the console the counts are under Mail › Masked addresses. From the command line:

vsx admin people masked-counts

Over the API