Google may soon let you create email aliases in an effort to fight spam
 

Looks like they want to copy Apple's hide my email. I think apple still has an advantage for allowing custom domains. It be nice google did the same thing.

Do you think Apple deserves the credit?
Other email services (eg Fastmail) have offered aliases for yonks, and I'm pretty sure for longer than Apple.

(Only mention this because Apple - which has some great products, don't get me wrong - is often undeservedly credited with inventing a lot of things that they didn't.)

OK, don’t know what ‘yonks’ mean, but Apple was earlier with Hide my email than Fastmail with Masked email.

Looks like both Apple and Fastmail launched their masked email on September 2021.

i dont like mask email. someday I created a account with mask email on such a website, say namecheap. i deleted the mask email then. a few days passed, when I want to re-login namecheap, they require a email verification. and I deleted that email account already. so I lost the access to namecheap. this issue has happened several times on me.

Disposable addresses like spamgourmet have been around for much longer. The possibility of Fastmail implementing such a feature was suggested and discussed many years ago when Jeremy and Rob were regular contributor to the FM forum.

FWIW I don't particularly like FM's masked email or any other similar mechanism where you don't have any control over generation of any part of the email address.

FM at least provides an alternate scheme to create aliases of the form something-appropriate@category.alias-domain so that you get to choose appropriate names that you want grouped under some specific category (folders). Also, once this is set up FM's own filtering handles sorting the incoming emails from that address into their something-appropriate folders (or inbox is no folder is provided)

With Fastmail's masked email you can restore deleted addresses, but you shouldn't have deleted these addresses in the first place. You ran into problems with masked email because you misused it.

They are largely about anonymity. Idiosyncratic formats erode that and consistent sub-domains remove it.

I've been using DuckDuckGo's free anonymous Duck addresses for quite awhile now and they have worked very well. Once in awhile I encounter some service that doesn't recognize a Duck address as legitimate, but not very often. I mostly use them for things like forum signups, newsletters, etc. Nothing financial or important. You never know when one of these services will suddenly start charging money or decide to go out of business, and then you could lose lots of email addresses and you might not know what they all are.