Start using Sneakemail.com before you become famous.

Suppose you’ll become famous overnight. You’ve used your email account for a while without a care in the world. All of a sudden, you go from an influencer to a celebrity. Everyone you know knows your email address. Next thing you know, so does Reddit. Nothing you can’t fix, but annoying as F. Now, you have to change your email and inform everyone you know that your new email address is this. Without knowing, you’ll also send it to the friend who put your email on Reddit in the first place, and they will immediately update their Reddit post with your new email.

Hate it when that happens.

This won’t be you.

This is not a paid ad, I genuinely use Sneakemail for everything myself, and it’s awesome and… Ancient. It’s been there since forever.

Sneakemail wasn’t meant to be a celebrity service, but it works for it perfectly.

Sneakemail costs you 3 dollars a month. It’s not a celebrity service; it was meant to fight spam. It works for that, too, but frankly, spam filters are so good these days Sneakemail is almost redundant for that use. HOWEVER. In the above use, it’s brilliant. Let me explain.

EVERY TIME you give out your email address to ANYONE, you’ll create a new Sneakemail forwarder for them. Don’t give your actual address, NOT even to your mom (because she’s the last person to consider it a secret if someone asks for it if I know anything about moms). Now, in you Sneakemail account, you’ll create that new address, name it “My Friend Todd” and give him the address that Sneakemail gives you.

If your friend Todd gives your email account to someone who then emails you, Todd’s name is going to appear on the sender’s list along with the actual sender. You’ll know it was Todd who gave them the address. You cancel his name off the list and get him on the phone: “What the fuck, Todd?!” If you get 1000 emails from “Your Friend Todd”, he’s probably the friend who updated Reddit about your email account.

Never again bug your friends about your new email address.

If you told SOMEONE your ACTUAL email address, or someone figured it out because it’s YourUniqueStageName@Gmail.com, you can change your email address to whatever else without contacting ONE of your loyal, trustworthy contacts. You simply go into your “Real Addresses” list and update the email to where everyone’s email is being forwarded to.

You can take some risks even after you become famous.

You may not know whether someone new is exactly trustworthy, but you’ll soon know if you give them a Sneakemail.com address rather than your actual address. If they leak it, not only will you know it was them, but you can also delete that email address so all of his or her downlines will lose the link to your email. And you get to keep your email account intact.

Direct your email where you want it.

You can also use three different real addresses on one account, so you’ll have one email account for your friends, one for your family, and one for your work contacts, for instance, so you never have to run into a ton of work emails when you want to take time off work. You simply tell Sneakemail that this person’s emails should be forwarded to Friends@YourName.com and that person’s emails should go to Work@YourName.com

Start now, so you have one less thing to worry about once the paparazzi is at your door.

Update all of your important (and not so important) website accounts with a Sneakemail address. Not all of them will accept it as the address is ugly and sometimes associated with spam, but MOST websites accept it. You won’t need to worry about updating them all if you need to change your email address now just because of Todd’s being a prick. Even if you had a personal assistant now, you’d still need to give them access to your freaking Google Passwords list so they can update this stuff for you, and fuck that, I say. That’s one heck of a security risk, one I’d rather not take.

Print some on paper to keep them with you.

You might want to create a few addresses ready to go and print them onto a piece of paper to give out emails on the go.

• Go to Sneakemail.com and create a new folder for these.
• Create email addresses that are numbered.
• Copy-paste (edit-paste special-values only) the list on the folder onto an excel or Google Sheets file
• Print out.
• Cut the address part like in those “have you seen my cat?” posters.
• Keep a pen with you so whenever you give out one of these addresses, you jot down the name of the person you gave it to, then update the address in Sneak.

Worth it even if you never actually become famous.

Regardless of your celebrity status, you’ll also find it amazing to be able to recover any web service account from years ago because you’ve got a Sneakemail.com address listed as your address. Even the obscure websites you didn’t bother to update the last time you changed email accounts and have now permanently deleted, will still be accessible to you because your Sneakemail address will forward the email to your current email without any drama at all. I’ve recovered 10-year-old accounts after at least 15 real email address changes in that time, personally.

It’ll be a habit change.

It’ll be a bit weird at first. It will feel weird at first. Still, do it. They’ll take you for a less pretentious prick if you start doing this now (so you don’t have to bother your friends with a new email change ever again) rather than after you’re a toffee-nosed too-important-for-Gmail-tosser-of-a-celebrity that suddenly demands special treatment. Foresight, people, foresight, lol.

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