Create an email alias with iCloud Mail and sort mail with rules

If you want to keep your email account junk free and avoid giving it out to websites and services, create an alias. Here’s how to create an iCloud Mail alias to avoid spam and junk mail.

It can be very useful to have two or more email addresses. For example, you can keep one private and only give it out to trusted companies, friends and relatives.

A second email address is useful for all the websites and services you sign up to on the internet. It acts as a honeypot attracting the spam and phishing messages while your private email account stays clean and junk-free.

Another reason why you need more than one email address is so that you can use different email accounts with different companies. This makes it easier to spot phishing because if an email arrives on the wrong email account, you immediately know it is fake. If you gave email address 1 to a company, such as your bank, but you get an email pretending to be from your bank on email address 2, you know it is a scam.

If you have a businesss then you may want email addresses like [email protected] and [email protected] and so on.

If you are now convinced that multiple email addresses is a good thing, let’s see how to create them using iCloud Mail on the Apple Mac.

Email alias

You could sign up with another email provider to get a second email address, but that is not necessary and it is not very convenient. You would need to log in to two different services to check for messages.

The simple solution for Mac users is to add another email address can be added to an iCloud account. Up to three additional email addresses can be added to iCloud and so you can have a total of four email addresses on one iCloud email account.

There is one main email address and three aliases. An alias is an alternative email address for an email account.

If your email is [email protected]. com you could add [email protected]. com as an alias. Emails to both addresses would appear in the same inbox. By adding an email rule, emails to one or both accounts could be automatically sorted into folders.

(You may be interested in Create custom email signatures in Mail and Deal with email faster using smart responses)

1 Sign in to iCloud

Go to the icloud.com website in a browser and sign in with your Apple ID.

2 Open the Mail app

All the iCloud apps are represented by icons. Click the Mail app to open it.

3 Mail Preferences

Click the gear icon in the bottom left corner of the page to display a menu. Select Preferences.

4 Add an email alias to Accounts

Select the Accounts tab and your main email account is displayed. Below it in the list is Add an alias. Click it.

5 Define the email alias

You can now create another email address for your iCloud account. Just type it into the Alias box. If you try to use an address that is already taken, a warning appears and you must try a different address. The hardest part of all this is coming up with an originl email name.

Enter a label for this email address. Labels appear next to emails and are useful for identifying them. Also select a label colour to help it to stand out. Then click OK.

6 Disable or delete an email alias

If the email address is currently unused, it will be assigned to you and it appears in the Accounts list on the left. Select it.

Down near the bottom is an option to disable the alias, which prevents it from receiving emails. This could be useful if it started receiving a lot of spam and you could simply turn it off.

There is also a link to delete it completely. If the email becomes spam-ridden or you just don’t need it anymore, click Delete. Let’s keep it for the moment though.

7 Check your inbox

Now that you have an alias, emails sent to the alias address appear in the inbox. The label appears in the preview and this makes it easy to distinguish those emails sent to your regular email address and those sent to the alias.

8 Create a rule to sort email

Click the gear icon in the bottom left corner to display the menu (screenshot 3), and this time select Rules. Click Add a Rule in the window that opens.

9 Define the email rule actions

At the top, select is addressed to. Below it, enter the email alias you created.

10 Create a folder for emails

Select Move to Folder and then click New Folder in the list below. We will create a folder to store messages that are sent to this email alias.

11 Finish the rule

Enter a name for this folder. I have used the same name as the Alias label, which makes sense to me, but you could use any name you want for the folder. Click Done to finish.

12 Use an email alias

Everything is now set up and in the sidebar below the Inbox and other folders is the new folder you created. Emails to the alias address will automatically be moved from the inbox to the folder.

For some odd reason I found that the rule did not move the emails from the inbox automatically until I had added the email alias to the Contacts.

I added a copy of myself to Contacts with the new email alias and the emails were then automatically moved to the alias folder. Try it if you find the rule is not working.