Bitwarden now lets you generate fake alias email addresses in addition to passwords

The popular open-source password manager is working with Firefox Relay and more to make this possible

Password managers are vital these days, helping you create and store individual and strong passwords for all of your online accounts. However, you might not be comfortable sharing your personal email address with every single service out there and might prefer to use either a throwaway email or an email forwarding service like Firefox Relay. This is where Bitwarden comes in with its latest update. It now directly integrates with SimpleLogin, AnonAddy, and Firefox Relay, helping you create unique and private user names in addition to passwords right through the Bitwarden app and browser extension.

In case you’re not familiar with email forwarding services, they essentially serve as a proxy, stopping online services from knowing your real email. These services allow you to create individual throwaway addresses for every single website you sign up for, with emails directed to them forwarded to your real email address. If you notice that one of them starts sending you spam or other unwanted emails, you can just stop that specific email address from forwarding content to your primary inbox, keeping it nice and clear from spam.

Setting up individual email aliases is usually a multi-step process that involves visiting the forwarding service in question, creating a new email alias, copying and pasting it to the website you want to sign up for and your password manager. Bitwarden’s latest update makes this much simpler, though, thanks to its integration with the three aforementioned forwarding services. When creating a new login item in the manager, you can now also generate an email alias from the forwarding service of your choice without having to visit its website.

There’s a bit of a setup process involved to get started with email forwarding in Bitwarden, but the password manager has extensive documentation for all three of its providers. Essentially, you need to grab your API keys from your email forwarding service and add it to Bitwarden when you create your first email alias. Once that’s done, you can go through the full process from start to finish using nothing but Bitwarden. Note that it looks like support for this is still in the process of rolling out, as Firefox Relay wasn't available for me in the browser extension just yet.

The integration with email forwarding services is an incredibly useful push for even more privacy on the web, and it only serves to cement Bitwarden as our top free password manager of choice — that’s right, this feature is coming to the free version of Bitwarden. It's available as a browser extension and on all relevant platforms, including Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.