When you give someone your alias address, there's a short journey that email takes before it lands in your inbox. It's worth knowing how it works — especially when something goes wrong.
The basic path
- Someone sends an email to
shop.xyz@aliasfleet.me - AliasFleet receives it
- We check whether that alias is active
- If it is, we repackage the email and forward it to your destination inbox
- The email arrives in your normal inbox, usually within a few seconds
From your end it looks like any other email — sender name, subject, content all intact. The only difference is a small header showing the alias it came through, which you may or may not see depending on your email client.
What "destination" means
Your destination is your real email address — the one you actually log into. You can have more than one destination on your account, which is useful if you want certain aliases forwarding to a work inbox and others to a personal one.
Each alias forwards to whichever destination you assigned it to when you created it. You can change that assignment later if needed.
Replying from an alias
If you have the reply feature enabled on a destination, you can reply to forwarded emails and the recipient will see the alias address — not your real one.
Without that enabled, replies go out from your real address, which defeats the point a bit. You can check and enable this under Destinations — toggle on Can Reply.
When forwarding stops
Forwarding stops in two situations:
Alias is deactivated — you toggled it off manually. Emails sent to it bounce back to the sender with a not-found response.
Alias is deleted — same result. Once deleted, that address is gone and any email sent to it goes nowhere.
There's no silent drop — senders get a proper bounce rather than their message disappearing into a void.
Delays and delivery issues
Normal delivery is near-instant. If an email is taking longer than a few minutes, it's usually one of:
- The sending server is slow or queued
- Your destination provider is temporarily delayed (Gmail and Outlook both have this occasionally)
- The email was caught by your destination's spam filter before it reached your inbox
Check your spam folder first. If emails consistently don't arrive, see Emails not arriving.