We designed Me and My ID to be better than other available options:
unlimited addresses
create new addresses on the fly, without needing to go to the site
addresses last indefinitely, unless you block them
block individual senders or the whole address
block temporarily or permanently
emails forward to your usual personal email address inbox, so they remain private
you cannot work out the personal email address from the Me and My ID email address (so it is unlike a gmail "+" alias)
free, for a lifetime, to users signing up during our start-up phase (but please spread the word).
This service is designed to preserve privacy - not to make you anonymous.
And of course, if an email address is hacked, lost, sold or stolen, the user will know who was responsible.
It’s certainly a good start, but unless you regularly check your alternative inbox, there’s a good chance you will miss some emails you’d actually quite like to get – a time limited offer you wanted to use; tickets lost in its junk folder you then have to hunt for before that email is automatically deleted; a competition you might have won.
With Me and My ID you still get the emails you signed up for; but only once that address is abused do you then reject the emails sent to it. It allows you to give the benefit of the doubt to the companies you sign up to, and see all their emails at first, only then weeding out the ones who overdo it or who lose or sell that address to others you never wanted to hear from in the first place.
Many web based email services allow “aliases”. In most cases these are limited e.g. Outlook.com/hotmail only allows ten per year. Often, you have to set them up before you use them (rather than just creating them in the right format which is all you need do for Me and My ID). In some cases, there are technical problems e.g. gmail uses a “+” symbol before you add a term to your usual email address which some websites won’t accept or ignore when replying (and in the case of gmail, it’s not exactly hard to work out what your real address is anyway). And if you want to block emails to these addresses, you usually need to know how to create special rules within that service to do so.
Me and My ID makes this all really simple. Create a new address; block emails with one click.
Given how easy it is to use a new Me and My ID email address, we suggest you use it almost every time you are asked for your email address, whether online or on paper.
We don’t recommend it for use with your friends and family as currently it’s not possible to reply to emails sent to Me and My ID addresses (this facility is coming soon), and you are likely to want to do so for these trusted people. We’re initially designed to deal with emails from companies and organisations who don’t usually read your replies, and prefer to send you links which you can use in the usual way.
While you can use it with highly trusted companies such as your bank, you may not feel that is necessary either. However, do remember that it only takes one leak of your personal address from one company to open your personal email up to spam, and if you’ve not used a Me and My ID email address, you won’t know where the spammers got your address.
Unfortunately, it only takes one unscrupulous company, or one whose own IT security is breached by hackers, or one of their employees with a memory stick walking out with a list of email addresses, and your digital identity has been exposed. Why take the risk if you can avoid it with Me and My ID.
By using different email addresses on different sites, though marketing emails from these third parties will always arrived at your existing inbox, you are reducing the risk of being hacked. Your real email address will be hidden and any virtual email addresses compromised will be of little use to hackers on all the other sites you use.
One of the ways people steal your identity is by compiling data about you from different sources, then using it to pretend to others they are you. If you sign up to a site which is in fact collecting data for use by someone trying to steal your identity – or even just play a fun game on Facebook that’s actually secretly designed to do the same thing – then the easiest way to link the data you provide to other information about you is your email address. Because these attacks are now done by computers and automated, then simply altering your email address each time you give it away will be very effective in reducing your risk of identity theft.
One thing your spam filter can’t do is match each sender to a particular email address. If you use Me and My ID, then you should only expect to get emails from Organisation A to the Me and My ID email address you set up for that organisation’s use. So if you get an email from a different organisation to Organisation A’s Me and My ID email address, you will be alerted to think carefully before opening it. Equally, if an email purporting to come from Organisation A is actually sent to an address you set up for a different organisation, then there is a good chance the email is not from who it claims to be from. In other words:
Sender A to Me and My ID Email Address A. Looks okay.
Sender A to Me and My ID Email Address B. Looks suspicious.
Sender B to Me and My ID Email Address A. Looks suspicious.
Me and My ID is a powerful new weapon in your fight against viruses, phishing emails, so called ‘Trojan horses’, malware etc.
No. Deciding to reject emails is designed to have the same effect as closing down your email account but for less effort. However, the sender will have been informed that the email address does not exist, so should be aware you did not receive it and may have tried to reach you a different way. Contact the sender to ask them to re-send the email to a working address.
Many companies remove email addresses from their databases when they get a response that tells them the address no longer exists. You may need to re-register with these companies, or change the address you registered with them to something different and then back to the Me and My ID email address.
We have to be absolutely sure that only you get emails intended for you, and we don’t forward them to the wrong person by mistake. If we tried to guess, we could get it wrong.For example, say we get an email to barclaysian@meandmyid.com. If your Part2 is “ian” you might think we could spot this as being intended for barclays.ian@meandmyid.com. But what if another user had “sian” as her Part2 and had set up barclay.sian@meandmyid.com? The email could be meant for her instead.
As we take confidentiality and privacy really seriously, then this is not a risk we can take so the email will be rejected. So, do take care when providing the email address that it is accurate, just as you would need to if you gave your personal address away. And better still, use our automatic copying facility to copy the address from the Your email addresses page to your clipboard, so you can then use Control-P to paste the exact address into any form you are filling.
No, but your personal email system’s spam filter will still be operating in line with the settings you’ve chosen. You may wish to reduce the level of filtering it applies, now you know you can deal with the abuse of any of your Me and My ID email addresses so simply. This will help ensure you don’t miss important emails which might currently be getting lost in your junk folder.
If you go to the Email Address Manager page you may be able to block emails from the address that is sending you unwanted emails, keeping the Me and My ID email address functioning for its intended use.
However, if there is not an obvious source email you can block, then we recommend you 'discard' (delete) that Me and My ID email address entirely and create a new one, updating the website you want to hear from with the new address.
Of course, if it starts to generate spam again, then you’ll know there’s a real problem with data security associated with that website, and you can alert them about it.
That’s pretty unlikely as we either forward emails to your personal account, or block them and tell the sender we did so.
The most common cause is that your email system is assuming our emails are spam. Please check your spam folder, and if you find the lost emails, make sure you mark each as safe rather than just reading them or moving them manually to your inbox. You can also mark emails from @meandmyid.com as safe.
If that doesn’t work do check you’ve given out the exact, correct Me and My ID email address – it needs to be in the format Part1.Part2@meandmyid.com – the dots between Part1 and Part2 and between meandmyid and com are both essential
Just go to the “Your Me and My ID email addresses” page and they are all listed there. You can even copy an address with one click so you can then paste it elsewhere.
We learnt that some older websites do not yet accept email addresses ending in “.email” so decided it was better to default to “@meandmyid”. However, @mmid.email addresses all still work. In fact, it doesn’t matter which you use.
You may have decided to “discard” (delete) that address, in which case it does not show up.
No. Our system will have been telling anyone emailing that address that it does not exist. You need to create a new address if you want to start hearing from that organisation again – maybe just add a “2”
The forwarded figure tells you the number of emails to that Me and My ID address from that sender that have been forwarded to your personal email address.
The blocked figure tells you the number of emails to that Me and My ID address from that sender that have been paused, rejected or forgotten and therefore and not forwarded to your personal email address. This figure will only increase while you’ve marked emails from that sender or to the entire Me and My ID email address to be blocked.
The forwarded figure reassures you that Me and My ID is receiving and passing on the emails you’d expect.
The rejected figure allows you to monitor the number of unwanted emails being sent to a Me and My ID email address and from whom they are coming. This could be helpful if you want to alert the company concerned about the abuse of your personal data i.e. that your Me and My ID email address has been provided to another sender.
You can, but you just can’t use exactly the same long description for that organisation. So consider numbering each use for the same party e.g. ebay1, ebay2, ebay3 etc.
We don’t do anything technically to change the email’s contents or appearance, so the problem is almost certainly with how they are being designed and sent in the first place. However, we are always happy to investigate problems to give you reassurance that this is the case. Please use the Contact page and give us as much detail as possible (see “How do I get more help?” below)
The founders developed Me and My ID in response to their own concerns about spam, security and privacy online. The site has been built by a leading technology company to the highest industry standards, and is hosted on Microsoft’s highly secure based cloud platform to ensure maximum security, scalability and reliability.
No
We can’t see any emails unless you personally forward them to us when you ask for our help.
No, not unless you ask us for our help and give us specific permission to access this information.
Yes
Yes – all users signing up at the moment will be able to use the service in its current form for free for life. (We may offer more services in future and might charge for those, but the basic forwarding and blocking process will remain free if you sign up now.)
We keep only the minimum amount of personal data we need to manage the service so we will never ask for your passwords to the sites you access using a Me and My ID email address. Unlike password keeper sites, we don’t think it’s a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket – you really should never give strangers access to even one password, let alone all of them!
We cannot see which sites you sign up to, or the emails you receive from or send to them.
We don’t keep copies of emails sent via Me and My ID.
If you want us to help you with a particular email, you will give us specific permission to look at any email.
We’re here to stay but understand you might be worried about relying on us for all your email so you can always print out or save the full list of all the Me and My ID email addresses you have operating to keep as a backup – you can then go to the sites you want to hear from and replace the Me and My ID email address with your personal address at any time without needing to access Me and My ID.
We love this new idea, but we’re sure we can improve it with your help. Tell us if we can improve the site, just drop us an email through our Contact page.
If you can’t find the answer here, please use the Contact page to send us a message. We aim to respond within 2 working days.
