Why we’re partnering with addy.io

Your email address is the one thing you can’t rotate.

You can change a password in ten seconds. You can cancel a card and have a new one by Friday. But your email address is attached to your bank, your government logins, your friends, and roughly four hundred accounts you’ve forgotten you opened. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

And it gets out there constantly. You hand it over to buy a t-shirt, to read one article, to download a PDF you never open. Then the shop gets acquired, or breached, or simply decides its “carefully selected partners” would like to say hello. Now your address is somewhere you never put it, and there’s nothing to undo.

That’s the mail we spend our days on. Leave Me Alone finds every subscription sitting in your inbox and gets you off hundreds of them in a couple of clicks. We’re proud of it. But it’s cleanup, and cleanup happens after the address has already leaked.

addy.io works on the other end of the same problem.

What addy.io actually does

Instead of giving a website your real address, you give it an alias. Something like groupon@johndoe.addy.io. Mail sent there forwards to your real inbox, and the site never learns where it landed.

If that alias starts attracting junk, you switch it off from your dashboard. Mail to it stops. Not filtered, not shuffled into a folder you’ll never open. Stopped. And because every site got its own address, you know exactly which one sold you out.

It’s the closest thing there is to changing your email address one website at a time.

Small companies have simpler incentives

We don’t think small businesses are automatically more ethical than big ones. But the incentives are cleaner, and incentives are what actually decide these things.

A big platform hands you the product for free, then answers to advertisers, shareholders, and a growth target every quarter. You’re not the customer in that arrangement, you’re a line item.

A small independent company charges you money for a thing, and that’s the whole business. You’re the customer, so your interests and theirs point the same way. It’s why we charge the way we do for Leave Me Alone. It keeps us honest, because we don’t have another way to make a living.

So we want to back other companies that work like that. Partly because we like them, and partly because there aren’t many of us, and we’d rather we were all still here in ten years.

Why addy.io

• It’s open source. The service, the browser extension, and the iOS and Android apps. You don’t have to take anybody’s word for how the forwarding works, you can go and read it.
• You can self-host it. If you’d rather not trust anyone at all, including them, that option is right there and documented.
• It can encrypt what it forwards you. Add your own GPG or OpenPGP public key and every message forwarded to you gets encrypted with it, subject line included. That’s genuinely useful if the inbox behind your aliases is Gmail or Outlook.
• It sells subscriptions, and that’s the business. There’s a free tier, and paid plans start at $1 a month billed yearly. Nothing else is being sold on the side to make the numbers work.

There’s also the small stuff that tells you someone cares. Aliases you can reply and send from, so a conversation doesn’t force you to reveal your real address halfway through. Multiple recipients on one alias. Your own domain if you want it. A proper API. None of it is flashy, all of it is the kind of thing you only build if you use the product yourself.

The deal: 25% off addy.io for Leave Me Alone members

This one runs both ways.

If you’re a Leave Me Alone paid subscriber, you get 25% off your first year on any addy.io yearly plan, which covers Lite, Pro, Duo, and Family. Claim the coupon from our partners page: enter the email address on your Leave Me Alone account and we’ll send the code to your inbox.

If you’re already an addy.io subscriber, your Leave Me Alone deal lives on addy.io’s Perks page: 10% off the 7 day Pass, 45% off the Yearly Casual plan, or 65% off the Yearly Inbox Zero Hero plan. Will has written up exactly how to claim it on the addy.io blog.

Neither company earns a penny on the other’s sales. The discount is what an affiliate commission would have been, handed to you instead.

Frequently asked questions

Is this an affiliate deal?

No. Neither company earns anything from the other’s sales. The discount replaces what would normally be a commission, so the value goes to you.

How do I claim the 25% off addy.io?

Go to our partners page, enter your Leave Me Alone account email, and we’ll send the coupon over. It applies to any addy.io yearly plan for your first year.

Do I have to change my email address?

No. Aliases forward to the inbox you already use. Nothing moves, and you don’t tell anyone you’ve switched, because you haven’t.

I use addy.io. What do I get?

Head to addy.io’s Perks page for your Leave Me Alone discount, up to 65% off our top plan, which includes unlimited unsubscribes for life.

Does one of these replace the other?

No, in either direction. Aliases stop new addresses leaking from today onward. Leave Me Alone clears out the mail already arriving at the address you’ve had for a decade. If you’ve been online a while, you want both.

More to come

We’d like to do more of these. There are a handful of small, independent, privacy-first companies we already use ourselves, and we’d rather send you to them than to whoever’s paying for the top ad slot.

No promises on who or when. But if you’re already paying for Leave Me Alone because you want your data left alone, it seems smart for us to point you at the other people doing the same job elsewhere.

If there’s a company you think we should be talking to, send us an email.