Create a new email on a privacy focused platform (I chose proton)
Sign up for an email relay service (Firefox relay, SimpleLogin, etc…)
Only give out your actual email to friends and family and tell them not to share it with others or services without your permission.
Change your email on ALL your services to a newly generated relay addresses. Only use relay addresses for any online service moving forward.
Monitor the old email for a while to find any important services you might have missed.
When you get spam from a relay address, you can decide to use the normal unsubscribe option, or the nuclear disable relay option. That’s it.
Bonus 01: since your changing all your services manually, you can decide to delete accounts you don’t need anymore.
Bonus 02: each relay is unique to the service so you can tell when a service either got hacked or sold your info.
Side Note: there are setups similar to this for credit cards. I use Wise.com for online transactions with 3 different “virtual” cards that I can destroy if they get exposed.
Thing is, any friends and family that click “accept” when an app asked for permission to see their address book will have accidentally released the “good” email.
I wonder whether there shouldn’t just be “an email I can read out to people on the phone” and the rest are all random privacy/hash ones.
You could always give out a relay to your family and friends as well. Both Firefox relay and SimpleLogin have custom domains so you can give you mom an email address like mom@myname.simplelogin.com
If you’re willing to pay for premium, Proton supports custom domains and catch-all addresses, so you can cut out all the extra mail relay stuff. Just give out vendor@mydomain.com, and it all comes back to the same mailbox. If it gets compromised, just set up a rule to trash anything to that address.
Even better is that simplelogin was purchased by proton and it being incorporated into the product. Already mostly done from what I can tell. I started with Firefox Relay and if they even give me a reason to leave I’ll just switch over to what’s baked into proton. There is something to be said for keeping them separate though. If I ever leave proton, having kept the relay service separate would be a big time saver.
Here’s how I solved email spam.
Bonus 01: since your changing all your services manually, you can decide to delete accounts you don’t need anymore.
Bonus 02: each relay is unique to the service so you can tell when a service either got hacked or sold your info.
Side Note: there are setups similar to this for credit cards. I use Wise.com for online transactions with 3 different “virtual” cards that I can destroy if they get exposed.
Thing is, any friends and family that click “accept” when an app asked for permission to see their address book will have accidentally released the “good” email.
I wonder whether there shouldn’t just be “an email I can read out to people on the phone” and the rest are all random privacy/hash ones.
Email is fundamentally broken, we need to start over.
You could always give out a relay to your family and friends as well. Both Firefox relay and SimpleLogin have custom domains so you can give you mom an email address like mom@myname.simplelogin.com
Oh that’s what I was looking for. Nice.
And this is how I ended up with 400 simplelogin emails
If you’re willing to pay for premium, Proton supports custom domains and catch-all addresses, so you can cut out all the extra mail relay stuff. Just give out vendor@mydomain.com, and it all comes back to the same mailbox. If it gets compromised, just set up a rule to trash anything to that address.
Even better is that simplelogin was purchased by proton and it being incorporated into the product. Already mostly done from what I can tell. I started with Firefox Relay and if they even give me a reason to leave I’ll just switch over to what’s baked into proton. There is something to be said for keeping them separate though. If I ever leave proton, having kept the relay service separate would be a big time saver.