An appealing reason to switch to Brave, an alternative to Chrome, has just been introduced: email aliases. This feature, revealed this week, enables Brave users to register on various websites and online services without disclosing their actual email addresses.

To utilize this feature, you must start by creating an account with Brave, providing your genuine email address. Once logged in to the browser, a pop-up will appear when you click on an email field on a website, offering the choice to utilize an alias instead. (If the pop-up does not show, simply right-click on the field to see the option.) The email alias will automatically fill in the website’s form, and any emails sent to that address will be redirected to your main email account.

The company states that utilizing an alias can safeguard your privacy, especially since websites use your email as a unique identifier, which allows them to target you with advertisements. Advertising technology giants such as Meta can also match the email you submitted to a retailer’s site, for example, with the address they have on file for you, enabling these firms to monitor your purchases or views.

Additionally, if a website where you shared your email is breached, hackers would then have access to your primary email address, potentially leading to the leaking of this information to data brokers.

Brave claims it developed this new feature to address this privacy gap, asserting that it does not examine the content of emails sent to an alias — it merely processes them for spam and virus detection. After the email is forwarded, Brave removes it from its servers. All data in users’ Brave accounts is also encrypted while stored, and any notes saved alongside an alias are stored locally on your device, unless you activate the sync feature. If syncing is active, notes will be end-to-end encrypted.

Since the email alias feature is still in its early stages, Brave has warned that some of the forwarded emails might initially land in your spam folder, but this should improve as Brave enhances its reputation as a mail provider.

For now, Brave users are granted five complimentary email aliases. Additional aliases will be made available for Premium plan subscribers in the future.