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Ask HN: What is your email aliases strategy/purpose?
I have recently created a fastmail account at "mydomain.dev" with the goal of transitioning from Gmail to a domain that I can control in case of lockout. I would like to use aliases to help with privacy and email management.
What is your strategy and reasons for creating aliases for different places you have to share your email? Or is this an attractive nuisance and not worth the mental effort of keeping track?
I considered creating a few aliases, e.g. med@mydomain for medical interactions, shopping@mydomain for e.g. walmart/amazon, social@domain for twitter/fb etc, but I don't quite see how this will help me though, beyond complicating things. But I am still intuitively hesitant to share my primary alias (name@domain) with just anyone.
I also can't quite see how to use it to reduce spam unless I create a unique alias for every website, which is not reasonable.
So have you used email aliases/subdomains and if so how did you use it and how did it help you?
- ddingus 6y agoFor a long time I used a catch all feature at my Gandi domain to send anything at mydomain to my gmail account. What I did was put their company in the email, sometimes with an easy to mentally create hash. I was convinced knowing who and more would help. It did, but with a twist! (One I did not expect) I found out a few things: (90's through 00's) Almost everybody sold those addresses. Seriously. Political campaigns trade on them frequently. Build up, suck them dry, get more. And whales get hit HARD. Interestingly, a filter for 5 spaces in a row got rid of a ton of spam. Curio for your thoughts right there. Some companies freaked right out at their company name as my email. lolol They "own" that, blah, blah... All the hassle did not get me much! Remember, almost everyone does let those addresses slip somehow, or they flat out trade on them. So, more addresses = more spam, and you do know who, but it also does not matter. It was all a push, bordering on net loss. So, I abandoned doing that and moved to a set of filters for important email sorted into buckets. Promoting known signal works for me. And there is always SMS, Skype, other channels. Peeps can get hold of me easy enough. Maybe I miss a little sometimes. When it happens, I am a good human about it and what comes from there is no big so far. Good luck!
- for_away 6y agoHaha yeah I was imagining I'd probably freak out some companies if I use their name in my email address. Currently I also use filters/labels in gmail, sounds like that is the better strategy.
- ddingus 6y agoWorks well for me. And yeah: Them: you can't do that Me: watch me Them: but it is our name Me: yeah, and my email. Try it. Did not get any takers. Pity.
- GianFabien 6y agoI have had some biz folks freak out when I used bigcorp@mydomain.com, they just couldn't grok how that wasn't like joe@bigcorp.com. So I now just use a generic term, but unique for each site. With a catchall on the mail routing I still get to see them all. Really easy to then auto-delete those who sell my address to somebody else. Also use unsubscribe option on a lot of newsletters, etc that I am no longer interested in. For the most part, they seem to work. If not, place them on the ever growing black-list.
- Daho0n 6y agoI use a catch-all email address and then use a unique email for each site. I also add a string and auto delete all mail without it (to not get random spam). IE ycombinator+my_string@domain.com. If I get spam I add the mail alias to /dev/null. Voilà, instantly aware of who sells data and bulletproof blocking.