One question that we get all the time in support is regarding the success of email forwarding for our Masked Emails. In this post, we’ll address why your Masked Email addresses may not forward to your target inbox 100% of the time.

When you sign up for a Blur account, you give us your personal email address. Any time that you feel uncomfortable giving out your real email address online, you can use Blur to create an anonymous “Masked Email” address. You might do this if you’re afraid that a company is selling your personal information to data brokers, or, if you’re afraid that a company might start sending you endless spam. If you give a site a Masked Email address and they email you, you’ll receive that email forwarded privately to your real email address you’ve set up with Blur. Click here for a short video demonstration about Masked Emails.

If you begin to notice that your Masked Emails are not forwarding properly 100% of the time, there’s likely a few things at play that could potentially be causing this to happen:

1. Recent attempts to forward emails using your Masked Email addresses have “hard-bounced”.  A hard bounce indicates a permanent failure of an attempt to deliver an email message. Here are the most common reasons for hard bounces:

• The target email address does not exist
• The domain name does not exist
• The recipient email server has permanently blocked email delivery

When we receive these hard bounce notifications, we then disable forwarding for all of your Masked Emails, in addition to disabling your ability to create any new Masked Emails. We do this to ensure that our bounce rates remain at a reasonable level. If we did not do this, we would begin getting flagged as spam by every mail provider out there, causing email delivery problems for every one of our millions of users. If you believe that this is what has happened to you, you’ll need to contact your mail provider to make sure that our Masked Email domains (@opayq.com) are white-listed.

2. Masked Emails are going straight to spam or junk mail. If this begins happening, you may have put a spam filter in place for Masked Emails, causing all forwarded Masked Emails to go directly to spam or junk mail. In this case, there’s a few steps you can take to prevent this in the future:

• Add the domain “@opayq.com” to your “Safe Senders” list
• Create a filter for the domain “@opayq.com”, and make sure to select the option that when an email message arrives that matches the filter, to never send those messages to spam
• Mark any emails that you receive with “[Masked]” in the “from” line as “Not Spam”

For detailed instructions for multiple email providers, you can refer to the following links:

• Outlook instructions
• Gmail instructions
• Yahoo! mail instructions
• MSN / Hotmail / instructions
• Other email providers

3. You have previously marked an email from a Masked Email address as “spam”. Any time you mark an email that comes in from a masked email (@opayq.com) as “spam”, it will keep you from receiving any Masked Emails in the future. To keep a Masked Email address from forwarding to your target inbox, instead of “marking as spam” simply block that Masked Email from forwarding. For instructions on how to do so, please refer to our FAQs page.

4. Senders of mail to Masked Emails have blocked our Masked Email domain because they think we’re sending spam. In this case, the sender of these emails may have black-listed our Masked Email domains or email server IP addresses. If this is the case, you may be told “please provide a valid email address” or “disposable email addresses are not allowed”. When this happens, simply email us at support [at] get abine [dot] com and we can change the domain for Masked Emails on these specific sites to one of our other domains (e.g. @maskedmails.com, @abinemail.com, @beconfidential.com, etc….)

For more info about Blur Masked Emails, check out our FAQs page and our description of the Masking features.

Register for Blur today.