Your email is your digital identity
Your email is the key brokers use to stitch your profiles together — a unique alias per service breaks that chain.
Your email address is the one identifier every broker uses to stitch your profiles together. Every time you hand it to a website, you add another entry to the broker database and another target for spam and phishing.
Relay breaks this chain. Give every service its own alias, and a breach burns the alias, not your identity.
How an alias actually works
An alias is a real forwarding address; disable it and the link breaks, with nothing pointing back to your real inbox.
An alias is a real, working email address — it just isn’t yours. When you generate one, Relay creates a forwarding rule. Mail sent to random-string@relay.knytx.com lands in your real inbox, formatted exactly as the sender sent it. You reply from your normal mail client. Relay rewrites the “from” header on the way out, so the recipient sees the alias, never your real address. No browser extension, no special app — it works with whatever mail app you already use.
The forwarding table is the only place your real email and an alias are ever linked. An alias can still leak: a broker sells it, a service gets breached, a marketer resells your data. When that happens, the leaked record is the alias, not your identity. Disabling it breaks the link on Relay’s side; nothing about the disabled alias points back to your real inbox.
Why a unique alias per service beats one “throwaway” address
A shared throwaway still lets brokers link your profiles; a unique alias per service breaks the link.
The common workaround is a single secondary Gmail or Outlook address used for every sketchy signup. It solves the spam-triage problem but not the tracing problem. Every service still shares the same identifier. So a broker who buys your data from three leaks can stitch your profile back together by matching that one address. A unique alias per service breaks that link. A leak from Service A only ever contains the Service-A alias, and nothing in it connects to Service B, C, or your real identity.
The unique-alias approach also makes breach attribution mechanical instead of guesswork. If spam starts arriving at the alias you gave one retailer, you know which company leaked or sold your data. A shared throwaway address just tells you spam exists somewhere across the ten services you used it for.
Where Relay fits next to a password manager and an ad blocker
Relay controls what a service knows you by. Pair it with a password manager and a tracker blocker; each closes a different gap.
Relay solves one specific problem: what a service knows you by. It doesn’t replace a password manager, which secures how you log in, or an ad/tracker blocker like KnytX DNS, which stops tracking scripts from loading. Run all three and each closes a different gap. You get unique credentials per service, no persistent tracking identifiers, and no durable email identifier for brokers to key on.
Also useful for
- Delivery and gig-economy apps. Give each delivery, rideshare, or gig platform its own alias. If one gets breached, you’re not chasing down which of five apps leaked your primary address.
- One-off purchases and warranty registrations. A one-time purchase or warranty registration doesn’t need your real email sitting in that company’s CRM for the next decade.
- Testing whether a company actually deletes your data. Give a company you’re suspicious of a dedicated alias, then disable it after you’ve requested deletion. If mail keeps arriving elsewhere under your real address, you’ve learned something about how seriously they took the request.
See also
- KnytX Shield — removes your real email from broker sites that already have it.
- KnytX DNS — blocks tracker domains at the network level.
- Pricing — where Relay sits in each plan.
- Trust ledger — how we handle mail metadata.