illumy is about bringing together email, instant messaging, and VoIP calling in a single super-app that’s super-free.
You heard that right: illumy’s simple interface and amazing features — from cloud file sync to unlimited on-net calling to a customizable profile — are completely free.
(If you’re wondering, illumy will be a “freemium” product. Later, we’ll introduce premium user features like off-net calling plans and an individual phone number to let you do even more on illumy.)
illumy’s free plan also lets you choose whether to share your personal information in your profile, or keep your real name secret. That makes it the perfect companion app for activities that demand anonymity.
You can even create an illumy account for each of the uses listed below. There’s no limit to the number of accounts you can have.
Here are 5 “hidden” ways to use a free anonymous email account from illumy.
1. E-commerce
illumy is a terrific tool for all of your online shopping activity.
That’s because stores are absolutely rabid about harvesting every shopper’s email ID.
Make just a single online purchase and you’ll get sale notifications, cart-abandonment reminders, “we think you might like” messages, coupons, promotions, and more.
And all of that is before your email gets sold by stores to third parties’ contact lists — opening your mailbox up to even more junk.
The only way to fully protect your user data in e-commerce is to sign up for a completely anonymous email (e.g., benfoster.shopping@illumy.com). Start to get spammed at that address? Just delete it and start fresh.
2. Job searching
Looking for a new job in 2023? You’re not alone. A staggering 96% of people plan to job-search this year.
To keep your applications, recruiter communications, job-board alerts, and other personal details organized, a free account with a secure email provider like illumy is an ideal partner in your job hunt.
illumy is a much smarter choice than a disposable email address like one from mailinator.com. With your totally customizable illumy username and profile, you can project a professional image that gets you noticed. And you don’t have to worry about “sharing” your email like you would with a disposable email account. On illumy, only you can see your email content.
illumy doesn’t just protect your online privacy. The free version of illumy also offers 2GB of storage space — plenty of room for your resumes, portfolio documents, presentations, or anything else you want to store and share.
(As a premium user, you’ll get even more storage — so stay tuned for that.)
3. Travel
Planning a trip is great fun. Research even suggests that the planning stage of travel makes you happier than going on the actual journey.
But if you use your ordinary day-to-day email address for travel planning, it can get messy. Mix up booking confirmations, Airbnb message notifications, and flight alerts with your regular email flow and you risk missing important email communication.
Not only that, you simply don’t know whether an overseas email recipient will sell your email address to a data broker or spam you with remarketing.
For booking travel, a free email address offering anonymous emails (like illumy) is a better way to go.
What makes illumy even better as a trip-planning companion is that we give you IM in addition to email. If you’re coordinating travel with multiple people and you all have an illumy account, you can IM them instead of emailing them for faster and more secure communication.
4. Sensitive personal info
A best practice with email is to not mix up uses when sensitive personal data is involved.
That is, the address you use for email messages to friends shouldn’t be the one you use for online banking. Ideally, you’ll have a discrete personal email address for each of your online banks, as well.
This is where anonymous email addresses can really come in handy. You don’t want a fake email address or burner email for sensitive private information — since you should be able to get notified about, e.g., your bank account.
Instead, you need a real email address that you can access anywhere but which will still protect your personal info.
Data breaches may be inevitable, but you can head them off by using unique email aliases on each individual site you transact with. Should a breach occur, you’ll have just a single email to update.
5. Newsletters
We just talked about RSS readers as a tool for gathering together your favorite news content.
illumy is an ideal partner for an RSS reader: helping you subscribe to and manage all of the email newsletters you subscribe to.
Just like how an RSS reader lets you create “channels” by topic, you can create a unique illumy account for all of your newsletters on a particular topic. With an illumy username like benfoster.contentmarketing@illumy.com, or benfoster.micromobility@illumy.com, you can neatly organize your newsletter subscriptions so you never get bogged down.
If you’ve signed up to receive individual writers’ Substack newsletters, illumy is great for that too. You can sort your Substack subscriptions into one illumy account, your professional newsletter subscriptions into another, and your “fun” subscriptions into a third.
Even if you only have a single illumy email address for all of your newsletters, the left panel makes managing them super-simple. The panel displays messages by sender, so you can see all of Noah Smith’s Substacks, or all of your Motley Fool newsletters, in a single list.
We’ve built illumy to be an amazingly powerful tool for all of your communication. Your messages live on illumy’s web email client and in our slick mobile apps — so no matter where you go, you’ve got a simple interface to send, receive, store, and share.
Get notified as soon as illumy 3.0 goes live with the form just below this post. Happy messaging!
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.
