I’ve recently been working to minimize my email clutter, my dependance on certain email providers, and to consolidate services under certain accounts.
I’m down to the following uses:
Apple ID, mydomain-billing/subscriptions, mydomain-official/legal, anon, friends/family, business domain.
I also have a handful of aliases and an account just for newsletters and my RSS app.
I’m curious if others have several email addresses for similar uses or if you use your email client to categorize incoming messages for you. For people who only have one email address, how do you manage this?
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i use a different address for almost every destination, all aliasing from a main domain. in this way i can track who sells my info.
any notable surprises you care to shame?
I do the same thing with email aliases and I’ve deactivated just two in the years I’ve been doing it.
One the comes to mind is Scentbird, they get hacked like every month because they’re on some shitty Wordpress server so they unintentionally leak your data all the time.
Not OP but Under Armor sells your shit instantly in my experience. I’ve got the same setup and just turn the address off after I get my order. I must have got forwarded 2-3 spam things a day before I killed it.
honestly, nothing to really report. this could be confirmation bias as i tend to avoid the problem actors( the facebooks, the fly-by-night vendors), but I have yet to see any egregious address-sharing in the last several years.
i still get quite a bit if spam from places that used to broadcast email addresses on their sites like early versions of the SETI distributed processing project
Kickstarter are the ones for me - I get spam unrelated to any projects I’ve backed, so somehow they got hold of that address…
Kickstarter does share it with the projects you back iirc, and those projects do occasionally sell that data to 3rd parties.
Pretty much why I’m glad I switched to Proton. They came out with Proton Pass, which includes aliasing, and I haven’t looked back. So far, I haven’t had any leak. However, I have come up against one, some shop service used by some companies, such as Vessi and CrunchLab. It uses the email address you put in with the first company you bought from. Kind of annoying but not deal breaking.
3 mailboxes
- Work
- Personal (general use)
- Personal (Important personal stuff)
That last email is for things I don’t want to risk reading in public. It’s the one I give to my doctor, financial advisor, insurance, tax authority, etc.
Work, gmail with a regrettable name i picked in my teens and can’t be bothered to migrate away from. Other gmail that I only have on my phone. Work mail, personal mai with firstname@uniquesurname
3 real adresses: personal, professional, school assigned. Countless aliasses
Three:
- Professional: [email protected]
- Register for bullshit e-mail: [email protected]
- The 16 year old me e-mail with a 69 in it that i still inexplicably use occassionally.
too many
I only have one email address from ProtonMail but I make extensive use of their “Additional Addresses” feature and I use ProtonPass email aliases. There are only a few sites which know my real email address (around 15 I think).
Edit: technically I also have a Gmail address but I’m trying to get rid of that since it has my deadname in it.
Non-gender specific Bruh, what you mean try? Just do it!
Meaning I’m in the process of doing it and almost finished.
I create unique email addresses for every organisation and service I deal with, including an obfuscated date, so when an address is compromised I can nuke it with a hard rejection, and regenerate as needed. This all feeds into a catchall mailbox, with server-side sieve rules to filter the stuff I actually care about.
I besides some account specific and burnt addresses, I don’t actively track of any of the addresses I’ve created, it would be in the hundreds by now.
One benefit of this crazy setup is there’s one less common identifier to match across disparate data stores.
Finally, no one should do any of The above. From experience I consider it pathological.
i started to create separate email aliases for every newsletter, account and contact like >10years ago. i still have some few aliases that i shared with friends so these are spread more wide. some of these aliases turned out to be useful as in the platform i created it for lost my data, i got some phishing mail and told the platform admins about their data loss, i then just stopped spam by changing that one single email alias. that happened i think four times.
this year i wanted to get rid of old domains and had to go through all of the aliases there, which turned out to be >400, that was a lot of work, but my setup turned out to be quite a good documentation about what accounts i’ve set up during that period. some accounts were for platforms that do not exist any more, many for platforms that changed owner (mostly without notice) while some accounts turned out to be stuck like i cannot even delete them, because if i try, that platform freezes the account for “weird looking actions” looks like they just do not want to follow the laws.
overall i think of maybe improving usability by platforms, (free)email providers and also newsletter senders, then creating some specs and try writing RFC style definitions and write a proof-of-concept to make “handshake” and email addresschanges possible and easy for endusers in large scale while achieving the same level of filterless spam protection that i have now.
when i find the time to do it.
Basically infinite, as I also have the catchall account of my domain.
Two.
One “official” with my name attached to it and one “trash” for places I don’t want to give any real data to.
Two. One main catchall, one backup / burner. Both on Proton Mail.
I have multiple domains and backup addresses on ProtonMail, so technically I have infinite addresses :P
I split mails domains at the identity level, and addresses (under my custom domains, for proton I use their simplelogin integration) are split between services, even though I use my main one in most places still.
