How to set up aliases

• What is an alias?
• Create an alias
• Disable an alias
• Delete an alias
• Alias delivery
• Catchall alias
• External targets and SRS rewriting
• How many aliases can I have?
• Masked email

What is an alias?

An alias is an additional email address.

Aliases allow you to have different email addresses which all deliver mail to your one Fastmail inbox, without needing to create multiple users. This can help you to sort email. For example, you might have a sales@mydomain.com address for sales inquiries, and a press@mydomain.com address for news inquiries.

Note that aliases receive mail — they do not send. Creating an alias, though, also creates a matching sending identity. This lets you send mail from your account using the email address matching that alias. You can customize other settings too, such as your signature. If you’ve created an alias and are not able to send from it, please be sure that a matching identity has been created.

If you're replying to mail that has been sent to an alias, Fastmail automatically selects the correct alias to reply from! You won't be responding to a technical support enquiry from the sales email address.

A distribution list is a type of alias where the target is a group in your contact list. Any message sent to the alias is forwarded on to all members of the group. This makes it easier to manage an address such as sales@example.com that needs to be distributed to a group of people. Distribution lists are suitable for small contact lists with few members, like your family members. For larger group mailing needs, we recommend Topicbox.

Only administrators for an account can set up aliases. If you’d like to create aliases and are not an account administrator, please talk to your administrator.

Note that you can't use an alias when you log in — you must always use your full account username.

How to create an alias

To add a new alias:

1. Open the Settings → Users & Aliases screen and scroll down to the Aliases section. Click the New Alias button.

2. In the Email section, type the desired alias into the corresponding field.
3. In the Delivered to section, select the user that will receive these messages.
4. Add a Description if you need to remind yourself later on why the alias was created. (The description will be displayed next to the alias in your Aliases section.)
5. Be sure to click Save.

Aliases may take up to 15 minutes to take effect.

Aliases can be used to direct email to other users, even non-Fastmail ones. See the Deliver to section below for a detailed description of how delivery works.

The SRS column should be left unchecked unless required. See the information on SRS rewriting.

How to disable an alias

You can disable an alias by going to Settings → Users & Aliases, clicking Edit next to an alias, and selecting Reject (bounce) all mail to this address, then clicking Save. Any further email sent to that alias will now bounce (be returned to the sender as undeliverable).

How to delete an alias

To delete an alias, go to Settings → Users & Aliases, click Edit next to an alias, and then click Delete Alias. This will cause any email sent to the alias to bounce, but will let another user to create that alias in the future, unless you own the domain of the alias.

Alias delivery

Email sent to an alias will be forwarded on to the email address (or addresses) specified in the Deliver to section. By default, the target of all aliases is your user. You can, however, change the target of an alias to be any other user, including other Fastmail users or a completely external email address.

You can target multiple users by adding multiple email addresses. If you do that, a copy of each email will be delivered to each target address. This can be a useful way to direct a copy of all email to a separate backup account at another provider. To do that, create a user and set up an alias that targets both your user and the external account you want backups to go to. Then, when you tell people about your email address, you can tell them your alias address instead of your usual address.

If your alias points to more than one email address, each recipient will count as one email sent for your account limits. This means that if you have one alias that points to three different email accounts, each email you send to this address will count as three emails sent.

You can target a contact group, so mail gets sent to every member within that group. This is useful for internal distribution lists.

You can also change targets to use plus addressing. Commonly, you might want email sent to a particular alias to go into a certain folder. The easiest way to do this is to use plus addressing. If you have a folder "aliasmessages", set the target to be youraddress+aliasmessages@fastmail.com and any email sent to the alias will automatically be put in the "aliasmessages" folder.

Note: alias targeting occurs before spam scanning or any rules are applied to a message.

Catchall/Wildcard Alias

See the catchall alias help page for more information.

External targets and SRS rewriting

On the aliases screen, there is an SRS checkbox for each alias. This can be useful if you have an external target (non-Fastmail email address) for one of your aliases, and the target server you're forwarding to uses SPF to block emails.

SPF is a way for domain owners to authorize only particular servers to send email with a certain SMTP MAIL FROM envelope. The problem is that when email is forwarded by a service, the SMTP MAIL FROM envelope should be preserved. When that happens, it looks like the forwarding service is trying to send email with the same SMTP MAIL FROM envelope as the original service, which is blocked because the forwarding service hasn't been authorized. This is a problem with the design of SPF. There is a way to work around this though, and it's called SRS rewriting.

You can enable SRS rewriting for email sent to a particular alias by enabling the SRS checkbox on that alias. We don't recommend enabling SRS unless you need to (for instance, emails aren't being forwarded correctly).

To get an idea of what SRS is, and what it does, here's an example. Say I have an alias abc@fastmail.com that targets xyz@gmail.com:

1. Someone sends an email from their Yahoo account def@yahoo.com to abc@fastmail.com. The email has an SMTP MAIL FROM envelope of def@yahoo.com and an SMTP RCPT envelope of abc@fastmail.com.
2. We accept the email, and see it is an alias with the target xyz@gmail.com. We forward the email with the SMTP RCPT TO envelope of xyz@gmail.com, and by default preserve the SMTP MAIL FROM envelope of def@yahoo.com.
3. However at this point, Gmail looks at the SMTP MAIL FROM envelope, sees @yahoo.com, does an SPF check and sees that the IP address of the sending server is one of Fastmail's, which isn't authorized by SPF to send email with an SMTP MAIL FROM envelope of @yahoo.com. It therefore rejects the message: SPF has broken forwarding.

When you activate SRS, we change the following:

• We accept the email, and see it is an alias with target xyz@gmail.com. We forward the email with the SMTP RCPT TO envelope of xyz@gmail.com, and we alter the SMTP MAIL FROM envelope of def@yahoo.com using SRS rewriting. This creates an SMTP MAIL FROM envelope of something similar to SRS0+abcd=Cw=yahoo.com=def@srs.messagingengine.com. Since @srs.messagingengine.com is a domain we control, there will be no SPF issue, and the message will be forwarded correctly.
• If for some reason the email ends up bouncing, the bounce message will be sent back to SRS0+abcd=Cw=yahoo.com=def@srs.messagingengine.com, which we'll receive. We will then unwrap the rewritten envelope, and send the bounce back to def@yahoo.com.

How many aliases can I have?

See the Account Limits page.

Masked email

If you want to create a new address to use when subscribing to services online, consider Masked Email. You can automatically generate a unique masked email address to receive and send messages, so your real address remains hidden.