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> A few more suggestions: > “Create a different email address for every service you use,” wrote Matt McHenry. “Then you can tell which one has shared your info
by orangepanda 7y ago
> A few more suggestions:
> “Create a different email address for every service you use,” wrote Matt McHenry. “Then you can tell which one has shared your info, and create filters to silence them if necessary.”
Obligatory mention - for gmail you can suffix your email address with a service name by using +, e.g., johndoe+adobe@gmail.com will be delivered to johndoe@gmail.com. So if a service leaks your data or sells your email, you’ll know who to blame.
Although the article recommends not to use gmail, it’s a neat trick if you’re stuck with it.
"Forget password" becomes unusable though, since you’ll probably forget what suffix you used for each service.
- zowie 7y agoOutlook.com supports this as well, and so does Fastmail.
- inapis 7y agoOh companies have become smarter about it! Even the scammers I suspect! Many won’t accept + in the email address and I think now it’s well known enough that most scammers will run a regex to detect and remove the + sign. Useful workaround is to have unique aliases on a domain name you control. Can’t get around that with a minute of work!
- kps 7y agoIf you control your email, you can do slightly better with the ‘+’. Share addresses of the form ‘me+my-tag@’, strip on ‘-’ to deliver these to ‘me+my@’, and have ‘me@’ immediately block the sender.
- Macha 7y agoIf you control your own email, why not just have company@ ?
- garren 7y agofastmail supports a variation of this: if my email is me@mydomain.com, then I can use service+me@mydomain.com, or better service@me.mydomain.com (or anything@me.mydomain.com). It seems like it'd be a little less obvious to scammers.
- johnpowell 7y agoWith fastmail you can just make a alias. My address is me@mydomain.com and in the settings you can make a alias where you can just use something like garbage@mydomain.com https://i.imgur.com/UWoU4NA.png https://i.imgur.com/UWoU4NA.png
- atomwaffel 7y agoFastmail also lets you use wildcards and catchall addresses, giving you infinite email addresses whenever you need them, with no way to tell what “base address” they resolve to internally. For example, my Twitter address might be twitter@mydomain.com, my Google address google@mydomain.com and so on. All of those go straight to my inbox unless I decide to set up individual filters for them. The downside is that I can’t easily migrate to a service that doesn’t support this.
- jen729w 7y agoShout-out to my new mail provider Migadu [0] whose model is “pay for the number of emails you send, not the number of mailboxes you have”. This opens up all sorts of interesting opportunities. Not affiliated, just a happy customer. [0]: https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html
- cproctor 7y agoI have been using this system for about a year, and it works great. I generally use the pattern yourdomain.com@accounts.mydomain.net. However, I have found from time to time that I never get account signup/confirmation emails to these addresses. It seems like they're being silently rejected. Does anyone know if there's some kind of email validation service that might be filtering these? I guess I could use a hash of the domain (eg asdffdsa@accounts.mydomain.net) to make my strategy less visible, but that feels like I'm probably overthinking it.
- muterad_murilax 7y ago"." works the same way.
- adambyrtek 7y agoNot the same way. The dot would be filtered out, but the part after the dot won't get removed, so john.smith@gmail.com is equivalent to johnsmith@gmail.com.
- muterad_murilax 7y agoAh, you're right of course. I was too quick to reply. Sorry.
- nishmastime 7y agoWell, another problem is that if you reuse email addresses, then a social engineering attacker has an easy starting place across all services.
- pmlnr 7y agoOr set up a mail server and add as many aliases as you with, one for each service.
- mandeepj 7y ago>since you’ll probably forget what suffix you used for each service You can put that in a safe wallet. OneDrive provides that now