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An alias is another email address associated with your account so that email to that address ends up in your accounts mailbox. An alias is not an entire separate account; it's just another way to send email to an account.
Why is this useful? A couple of reasons:
So when you want to create a new email address, you have 2 main options.
Now when email arrives for a particular alias, it really just gets redirected to the alias 'Target'. So if you create newalias@fastmail.fm you have to target it somewhere, namely, youraddress@fastmail.fm
An alias target is just the email address (or addresses) to actually send the email to that matchs that alias.
By default, the target of all aliases is your account name, so email sent to an alias instead is sent to your account.
You can however change the target of an alias to be any other account, including other FastMail.FM accounts or a completely external email address.
You can target multiple accounts just by putting a comma (,) separate list of 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 if you want. To do that, create an account and setup an alias that targets both your account, and the external account you want backups to go to. Then when you tell people about your email address, tell them your alias address, never your accounts address.
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 with the 'Target'. So if you have a folder 'aliasmessages', you can set the target to 'youraddress+aliasmessages@fastmail.fm', and any email sent to the alias will automatically be put in the 'aliasmessages' folder.
One thing to note is that alias targeting occurs before any rules or spam scanning is applied to a message.
FastMail.FM allows you to setup 'aliases', so that emails sent to another email address end up in your accounts mailbox.
An alias is both a name and domain combination. eg me@fastmail.fm or you@eml.cc . For normal aliases, the domain must be one of the ones we own (eg. fastmail.fm, etc)
You can also setup 'virtual domains'. In this case, FastMail.FM will accept email for an entire domain and target it to selected accounts for you. See this FAQ section for more details.
The number of aliases you are allowed is determined by your service level.
The number of included aliases and virtual domain hosts depends on your service level.
In addition to these aliases, there are also 'virtual domain' aliases.
Only Enhanced accounts may use virtual domains. Enhanced accounts include 50 free virtual domains, and 200 free virtual aliases within those hosted domains.
See our pricing table for full details.
All users can use a great feature called "plus-addressing", and paying users can use an extension of this called "subdomain addressing".
They allow users to vary their email address. They also help users organize their mail into folders. You do not have to configure anything to create these addresses; they work right now. Note that subdomain as well as plus-addresses work for usernames as well as aliases.
Plus-addressing ('username+foldername@fastmail.fm') allows FastMail.FM users to create an unlimited variety of email addresses. By matching addresses to folders, these addresses can also help organize mail into folders.
Example: 'jcitizen@fastmail.fm' wishes to subscribe to a mailing list about sandwiches, but use a different address. So, he subscribes to the list as 'jcitizen+sandwiches@fastmail.fm' The mailing list fills his Inbox folder with mail. Eventually, jcitizen decides the mailing list is too much for his Inbox, so he creates a new Folder named 'sandwiches' (not 'inbox.sandwiches'). Thereafter, all mail he receives from the sandwiches mailing list gets organized into the folder 'sandwiches' not into the folder Inbox.
Caveat: The main downside of this approach is that addresses with '+' are considered (incorrectly) by many forms on the Internet to be invalid. So entering an address in that form may not always work. Furthermore people may find this kind of address hard to remember, because it is quite unusual. FastMail.FM subdomains, described below, overcome these problems.
Also see note below "Plus addressing with a catchall"
Subdomain addressing ('foldername@username.fastmail.fm') offers all the advantages of plus-addressing with fewer disadvantages. Paid accounts (Member or better) have control of their very own subdomain.
Example: 'jcitizen@fastmail.fm' wishes to subscribe to a mailing list about sandwiches, but use a different address. So, he subscribes to the list as 'sandwiches@jcitizen.fastmail.fm' The mailing list fills his Inbox folder with mail. Eventually, jcitizen decides the mailing list is too much for his Inbox, so he creates a Folder in his account named 'sandwiches' (not 'inbox.sandwiches'). Thereafter, all mail he receives from the sandwiches mailing list gets organized into the folder 'sandwiches' not into the folder Inbox.
Caveat: your username cannot include an underscore (_), since hostnames on the Internet cannot have underscores. Use the 'Rename' link on the 'Options' screen to change your account name if you want to remove the '_' to enable subdomains.
Note that only one level of subdomain addressing is supported. ie., if your username is jcitizen@fastmail.fm, then anything@jcitizen.fastmail.fm will work, but anything@anythingelse.jcitizen.fastmail.fm will not work.
If you are using a virtual domain and have a 'catchall', see this FAQ entry for some special details on targets of catchalls.
Note: Sub-domain and plus addressing also use fuzzy folder matching. When a regular folder match fails, folders are compared case-insensitively, with the characters "-"(hyphen), "_"(underscore), and " "(space) treated the same. So if you have a folder "Mailing Lists.My List", then mails sent to username+mailing-lists.my_list@domain.tld will get filed to that folder.
Apart from the above, if after a match the delivery of the mail should have been to a sub-folder, and if that sub-folder is not present, the mail is delivered to the parent folder as you would expect, rather than to the Inbox folder. i.e., if you sent a mail to username+mailing-lists.yahoo@domain.tld, and if you don't have a sub-folder "Yahoo" for the folder "Mailing Lists", the email would go to the "Mailing Lists" folder, rather than the "Inbox" folder.
More sophisticated mail sorting can be done with sieve script. However, the power of sieve is proportional the complexity of the sieve code you are willing to write.
These addressing features are great for managing mailing lists, registrations, and for avoiding spam by setting up reject filters for addresses that get on spammers' lists. So next time you register at a company's web site, try registering as 'companyname@username.fastmail.fm'. If that company starts sending unsolicited email or sells your address, simply click 'Options', and 'Define Rules' and set up a rule to reject messages to that address!