Maski vs SimpleLogin: the alias is the easy part

SimpleLogin has been doing this longer than I have. It is owned by Proton, its code is public, and mine is not. If what you want is the safest, most established pick in this category, go and use it. I would rather say that in the first paragraph than bury it at the bottom where nobody reads.

Here is the case for Maski anyway.

Handing out a fake address is the easy half of this problem. Every tool on this page does it. The half nobody solves well is the month after, when the address you gave a hardware store in March starts selling you crypto, and your choices are delete it or keep eating it.

Two different bets about where the work is

SimpleLogin bets you want a lot of aliases, cheaply, forever. That is why their pricing page leads with unlimited aliases on Premium and caps the free plan at ten. It is a reasonable bet and the price reflects it.

Maski bets the opposite. You will end up with a few dozen addresses you actually care about, not a thousand you have forgotten. So the free plan is ten aliases rather than unlimited, and the effort goes into what happens when mail arrives at one of them. Forward it. Hold it in a Maski inbox instead of your real one. Block that one sender and keep the rest. Kill the whole address from inside the email you are already looking at.

If you want a thousand aliases, I am the wrong tool and there is no version of this page where I am not.

The unsubscribe button, pointed somewhere useful

Marketing mail carries a machine-readable unsubscribe header. Your mail client turns it into a small Unsubscribe link next to the sender name. Pressing it hands the sender a signal: this address is live and a human reads it.

Maski puts its own one-click pause into that header. Same button, same place in Gmail or Apple Mail, except it does not talk to the sender at all. The alias stops accepting their mail. They find out nothing.

I am not going to tell you SimpleLogin cannot do this, because I can only report what their pages say and their pages do not discuss it. What I can tell you is that it is the feature I built first and the one I use most, and that it only works because Maski controls the address rather than just relaying through it.

The alias is not the unit of trust. The sender is.

One address usually has several senders behind it. You hand shop@ to a retailer, and within a year it is the retailer, their email vendor, the loyalty program they sold you into, and whoever bought the list.

Deleting the alias punishes all of them for what one of them did, and it also breaks your order receipts. Maski takes the rule down a level: forward this sender, block that one, hold the third in a Maski inbox so it never touches your real one. The address keeps working for the part you still want.

Your own domain, without losing an afternoon to DNS

Both tools let you bring a domain, and SimpleLogin states unlimited custom domains on Premium, which is more than Maski offers. Take that one as conceded.

The difference is the setup. With most of these tools you are handed a table of MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records and sent off to your registrar to retype them. Maski asks you to authorise your DNS provider once and then publishes the records itself. Cloudflare, GoDaddy and DigitalOcean today.

This sounds like a small thing. It is the step where most people give up on custom domains entirely, which makes it the difference between a feature you have and a feature you use.

BE HONEST: when SimpleLogin is the right call

It is cheaper. Premium is $36 a year. Maski Pro is $4.99 a month, with no yearly rate. Pro is free for a year for the first 1,000 sign-ups, so the first year is not the comparison that matters. The second one is, and they win it.

You can reply for free. SimpleLogin lists replying from an alias on its free plan. On Maski that is a Pro feature. If replying is the whole reason you want an alias service and you do not want to pay, they have already won this comparison.

Their code is public and mine is not. SimpleLogin states that its components are open source. The Maski repository is private. If you will not run a privacy tool you cannot read, that is a coherent position and you should act on it.

Unlimited aliases, and mine are capped. Premium removes the alias limit entirely. Maski caps both plans, and if the way you work is a brand new address for every single signup then you will hit my ceiling and never come close to theirs.

Is one of those the reason you would not switch?

Then tell me which one. If the thing keeping you on SimpleLogin is a feature I do not have yet, I would rather hear it from you than guess at it, and a short note saying what you need and what you are using it for is worth more to me than any amount of competitor research.

Write to jay@maski.dev and it comes to me. If you would rather it went to the support queue, use hey@maski.dev. I cannot promise to build everything, and I will not pretend otherwise, but nothing gets built that nobody asked for.

Compared on	Maski	SimpleLogin
Price	Free, or $4.99 a month for Pro Buys the alias service itself. No mailbox or storage is bundled in. Pro is free for a year for the first 1,000 sign-ups.	Free, or $36 a year for Premium Buys the alias service. Also listed as $4 billed monthly; their page prints a bare $ with no currency code. Pricing — SimpleLogin, opens in a new tab
Aliases included	10 on Free, 25 on Pro	10 on the free plan, unlimited on Premium Their free plan stops you creating more past ten. Pricing — SimpleLogin, opens in a new tab
Custom domains	Yes, on Pro Bring your own domain. Maski can publish the DNS records for supported providers.	Unlimited on Premium, bring your own domain Bring your own domain. Listed under Premium only. Pricing — SimpleLogin, opens in a new tab
Reply to a forwarded message	Yes, on Pro The alias stays in the From address. Your real address is never disclosed to the sender.	Yes, on the free plan Listed among the free plan's features. Pricing — SimpleLogin, opens in a new tab
Send a new message from the alias	Yes, on Pro You compose in your own mail client and address the message through Maski, so the alias is the sender.	Premium only Their docs: available only with a paid plan. Pricing — SimpleLogin, opens in a new tab Sending docs — SimpleLogin, opens in a new tab