Brave Browser Surpasses Chrome with Innovative Email Alias Feature

The Brave browser, known as an alternative to Chrome, has rolled out an enticing feature: email aliases. Unveiled this week, this capability allows Brave users to sign up for various websites and online services without revealing their actual email addresses.

To take advantage of this feature, you first need to create a Brave account and provide your real email address. After logging in, you will see a pop-up when clicking on an email input field on a site, offering you the option to use an alias instead. (If the pop-up doesn’t appear, you can right-click the field to find the option.) The created email alias will automatically fill in the website’s form, and any emails sent to that alias will be redirected to your primary email account.

As stated by the company, using an email alias significantly boosts your privacy since websites frequently utilize your email as a unique identifier, allowing them to target you with ads. Firms in the ad tech realm, like Meta, can connect the email you provide to their records, enabling them to monitor your purchasing or browsing behaviors.

Moreover, if a website where you’ve shared your email becomes compromised, hackers might access your primary email address, potentially leading to it being sold to data brokers.

Brave has designed this feature to help reduce these privacy threats, assuring users that it does not view the content of emails sent to aliases—only scanning them for spam and viruses. After forwarding, emails are deleted from Brave’s servers. All data associated with Brave accounts is encrypted while in storage, and any notes tied to an alias are saved locally on your device unless you choose to sync. If syncing is enabled, notes are protected with end-to-end encryption.

As the email alias feature is still quite new, users may experience that some forwarded emails initially end up in their spam folders, though this should improve as Brave builds its reputation as a mail provider.

Currently, Brave users are allowed five free email aliases, with additional aliases planned for Premium plan subscribers in the future.