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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
same.
s/proton/tuta/
You forgot to disable case sensitivity
s/\/$/\/gi/
deleted by creator
This made me laugh. You must be a blast at parties!
:P
I had 2 main ones, but they also got emails from one of my old accounts, for technically 3. But I just moved to Proton mail, so now I’m trying to stick with one + aliases. I’m hoping to keep it this way 😤
How do you like it? I was thinking of going that route, especially with their Easy Switch tool.
I actually really like it! It’s much more organized and I don’t feel overwhelmed having to look through and remember different accounts. And the alias feature has been amazing. Much simpler than making a temp email address. Setting it up wasn’t bad and they walk you through forwarding and all that stuff. I had 2-3 Gmail accounts before the switch and I honestly won’t go back, even if Proton vanished tomorrow.
Three. One from work, one personal, one throwaway.
I use about 200 junkmail addresses when I am testing online services with registration.
10 that I know of.
Genghis Khan.
Two.
One “official” with my name attached to it and one “trash” for places I don’t want to give any real data to.
Basically infinite, as I also have the catchall account of my domain.
I counted 11 across 3 different providers.
1 in Aol mail
3 in Google Mail
7 in InstAddrI use two actively but technically I have a gmail adress but only use it to log in to YouTube with it. If you sent me an email there I will probably never see it.
I have a “professional” email with my real name and one with my “online” name. They used to both be on gmail but now they are on Protonmail.
I also have some domain names I own which I can set up with Protonmail as the provider… Kinda tempted to move everything over to my domain so that I can switch providers if I need to without having to update things.
Three personal, one work, two throwaways
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 this same thing with unique email addresses recipients when I have to give out an email address. My “wall of shame” email sellers/hacked companies includes:
- eharmony.com
- parkmobile.com
- 000webhost.com
- honarable mention for eventbrite.com
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
I find the exact same thing. I always use an alias when signing up for some stupid parking app or new healthcare system that I can’t avoid and I’ve surprisingly never seen the aliases being re-used by anybody but them.
I was expecting at least a data breach, but it’s been clean for the past 10 yrs or so.
It’s possible data brokers are just good at stripping whatever is behind the “+” though.
im using a bucketed approach so i dont use the +… i add the vendor name into the email address so its always something like amazonsucks@mydomain.com for amazon (for example)
I don’t do the
+thing either, I just use a password generator to generate the prefix before
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
