this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

any notable surprises you care to shame?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

im using a bucketed approach so i dont use the +.. i add the vendor name into the email address so its always something like [email protected] for amazon (for example)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I don’t do the + thing either, I just use a password generator to generate the prefix before @

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

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
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Kickstarter are the ones for me - I get spam unrelated to any projects I’ve backed, so somehow they got hold of that address…

[–] ChairmanMeow 2 points 2 months ago

Kickstarter does share it with the projects you back iirc, and those projects do occasionally sell that data to 3rd parties.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You forgot to disable case sensitivity

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Non-gender specific Bruh, what you mean try? Just do it!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Meaning I'm in the process of doing it and almost finished.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Three:

  1. Professional: [email protected]
  2. Register for bullshit e-mail: [email protected]
  3. The 16 year old me e-mail with a 69 in it that i still inexplicably use occassionally.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Two.

One "official" with my name attached to it and one "trash" for places I don't want to give any real data to.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

3 real adresses: personal, professional, school assigned. Countless aliasses

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I counted 11 across 3 different providers.

1 in Aol mail
3 in Google Mail
7 in InstAddr

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have a wildcard rule set up to catch things sent to addresses on my domain that I don’t have explicitly configured… so technically, I have infinite email addresses.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Me too. I use [email protected] for almost everything. Not only I can have many mynames, I also can have very many theirnames.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Also makes it relatively easy to see who leaked your data.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I have one paid email address that’s my main that I purchased from an overseas provider, just to complicate spying and reduce perverse motivations to use my data to profit.

I have a secondary older email address, a professional work email address, and then a long tail of anti-spam aliases.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I use about 200 junkmail addresses when I am testing online services with registration.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I made a bunch of burner Google accounts back when it was easy to do so so I have many addresses from there + a couple in protonmail. In total it should be 2 "serious" addresses, 1 for games and non-serious services, 2-3 for some specialized stuff and about 8(?) dummy accounts, some of which have connected accounts to social media which have been locked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Dozens, but they all converge into 2 mailboxes. It's nice to keep things separate, but it does get confusing sometimes. If I didn't have a password manager to remember my logins, it would be untenable.

For stuff I'm going to use long terms i use my lifetime university email address which forwards to me main fastmail address. I have several fastmail addresses for dev stuff, bacon (not quite spam), one for patreon and kickstarter, and so on. Those all go to one mailbox.

My old gmail account is just for spam, google's account spam, and (I only recently noticed) github. I check that mailbox like 3 times a year.

Also all my domains have at least an info address that forwards to my dev fastmail address, and we have a household group address that forwards to my fastmail as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

One real (actively used) email address on Proton Mail, 300 aliases on SimpleLogin and addy.io

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I daily use 4, plus some temporary

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Mostly six: family and friends, romantic relationships, professional, online identity, signing to Google services*, signing to other services.

I say "mostly" because I went through dozens of addresses, already abandoned. And the "signing to other services" e-mail has disposable addresses, that I use fairly often.

*I use this as a way to limit what Alphabet knows about me, given that it's the biggest data vulture that I can't get rid of.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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 😤

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago
  • One private
  • One professional-private (which is an alias to my private one)
  • One work email
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

$dayjob gave me an email, but they are the only ones that use it. My primary is a GMail, though I really should switch to a less crappy provider. I run my own mail server, all my GMail is just forwarded there, but it's not my primary because too many people were having problems sending or receiving mail though there.

So, 3 or less in practice.

I also have a half-dozen variant usernames at GMail and can trivially create as many as I like on my own mail server. So, unbounded in theory.

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