Definition: email alias

An email address that is relayed by the recipient's mail server to the same inbox. For example, samjones@company.com may be the primary address and sjones@company.com and sj2@company.com are the alias addresses.

An alias enables people to give out different addresses in order to not publish their primary address to everyone. All alias messages will go into the user's primary inbox; however, they can generally be filtered into separate folders.

What Everyone Should Have Done in the First Place
In the early days of the Internet, very few people thought of setting up an additional email account. However, countless websites offer free services, white papers, etc. but require a user's email to which the company continues to send offers. In many cases, the email is sold to other organizations, and after a few years, people wind up with tons of unwanted emails every day. An email alias is a way of keeping the primary inbox less cluttered.