Every site that asks for your email at sign-up takes something bigger than an address: it takes a key linking your account there to your account everywhere else. Advertising companies match users by the same email across sites, and that matching happens on the server rather than in the browser, so blocking cookies does not stop it.
The Brave browser added a feature on 27 August aimed at exactly this point: email aliases.
What it does
It generates a throwaway email address for each site, so the site registers you under that address and its messages reach your real inbox. The site never sees your real email, and an advertiser finds no shared address to match on.
The requirements
- Version 1.94 on the desktop. Phone versions are in development.
- A Brave account, which is not a Brave Premium subscription. It is created with an email and a strong password.
- Five free addresses at first release. The company says a paid tier will follow.
Where they are made and managed
They are generated straight from the email field on a sign-up page, or from the right-click menu. They are all managed from Settings: autofill and passwords, then email aliases, or at brave://settings/email-aliases.
What the company sees
This is the part worth reading before switching it on:
- The email and the aliases are stored encrypted with them.
- Forwarded messages pass through standard spam and virus filtering, then are deleted from the servers within seconds.
- The notes you write on each alias stay on your device, unless you enable sync, in which case they are end-to-end encrypted.
- The account password is never sent to the servers at all, because sign-in runs on the OPAQUE protocol.
The idea in one line
Brave’s argument is that partitioning cookies and storage inside the browser is no longer enough, because the matching has moved to email. So it extended the partitioning outside the browser: one address per site.
Photo: rows of mailboxes along a corridor. By PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: the Brave blog, “Privacy Updates” no. 39, “Brave launches Email Aliases”, 27 August 2026.
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