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Or just click the unsubscribe button myself? Is forwarding the email really any easier than unsubscribing yourself?
by camhart 6y ago
Or just click the unsubscribe button myself? Is forwarding the email really any easier than unsubscribing yourself?
- jen729w 6y agoA fine option, which I also endorse. In all seriousness, here’s what I do to combat Insidious Mailing List Spam. It’s kinda simple. 1. Get one email address for friends and family. Never ever post it online. Never use it for any shopping or anything. This is your email address. There is no mailbox anxiety because you get one email a day to this address and it’s from your dad and you love him. 2. Get another one for mailing lists. Crucially, using a rule, mark every new mail as read on receipt. There is no mailbox anxiety because the “read me” or “keep me unread until I’ve actioned” or whatever is gone. Totally gone. Need to do a thing with an email? Figure out a way outside your inbox to track that. I started this accidentally about a year ago and it’s a revelation.
- remote_phone 6y agoThis kind of works. But also realize that if your email makes it into their contacts, then phone apps will harvest this. Things like WhatsApp or LinkedIn will definitely harvest these so it’s not nearly as secure as you believe. You could have double indirection where you create a secret email and give everyone a second secret email and forward all emails from there.
- fabienpenso 6y agoJust filter all those mail into a unsubscribe folder instead of marking them as read. Also filter all emails with unsubscribe in their body to that folder. Works like a charm.
- gus_massa 6y ago> Get one email address for friends and family. Never ever post it online. It works until someone sends an email with cat photos to your secret address and all their contact list, and forget to use bcc.
- Moru 6y agoThat's why you have one mail for clueless and one for those that do have a clue. Been doing thish for 25? years :-)
- gruturo 6y agoI have been doing this for well over 10 years and can confirm the approach, with one small tweaks: The address for friends and family should be split in 2 - one for the really technologically literate ones, who will never do stupid crap with it like using it in a pinterest "Share this!" form, and one for everyone else (who must never learn you didn't give them "best" address because they're clueless). Also, if you own a few domains, devote a whole cheap one to mailing lists, online subscription and whatever else. Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service (like mybank@myjunkmaildomain.icu, amazon@myjunkmaildomain.icu, facebook@myjunkmaildomain.icu, somedodgyonlinemerchant@myjunkmaildomain.icu etc). This gives you the benefit of seeing who leaked your address when you see spam, of being able to disable them individually, of being able to migrate provider with no impact to your accounts (just repoint your own domain's email forwardings)
- Moru 6y agoYou can also use the + for email adress, my.name+facebook@domain.com. No need to register another mail adress for each service. It can lead to problems logging in though, not everyone knows that + is a legal character in mail adresses.
- pta2002 6y agoCan also just get a catchall and forward everything to the same inbox, and then create folders based on the receiving email.
- paledot 6y agoI had enough validation and dictation issues with that approach that I registered a catchall email on a subdomain, so I give out yoursitename@email.example.com. For one thing, anyone wise to that trick will just strip /\+[^@]*/ from your address and bypass the fingerprinting.
- D-Coder 6y agoPanix.com has a feature that sidesteps that problem. It accepts any email address that looks like: hackernews@myname.users.panix.com, where you can customize "hackernews" to be a mailing list, company, or any text; and "myname" is your actual email address, eg myname@panix.com. No charge. Works great. Easily filtered. Disclaimer: just a satisfied customer.
- faitswulff 6y agoI just set up a wildcard email forwarder on my domain and set up an email address for every domain or website I sign up for (e.g. ycombinator.com@mydomain.net). Keeps everything nicely separated, logins are predictable, and I can track who got my email from where. It makes certain things more complicated, like authenticating against certain services, or if someone sends and invitation to one of your domain emails, but it works just fine 95% of the time.
- mtlynch 6y agoI used to have this problem with Gmail because it was easy to receive mail at a new address, but always a 10-minute process to start sending mail from a new address. I just switched to Fastmail and was pleasantly surprised with their solution. You can set up wildcard response aliases so that if you receive an email to random.onetime@mydomain.net, when you hit reply, it automatically sends from the random.onetime@mydomain.net.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoI’ve been dealing with that frustrating aspect of Gmail for years, had no idea fastmail had a better solution. Thanks for the heads up!
- faitswulff 6y agoOh wow, that’s actually a very compelling reason to look at FastMail, thanks!
- toast0 6y agoMailbox anxiety goes away after you have a couple thousand unread emails for years. Mark as read is too much work. Whatever.