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Ask HN: A way to manage many unique email addresses?

7 points by ranie93 ↗ HN
Is there a service or tool(s) that could help me manage many unique email addresses that can all be forwarded to one master address?

My goal would be for any online service I use to have a unique email address, and for me to be able to log into one mailbox to see/manage the email received from these proxy addresses.

The ultimate goal being increased sandboxing of services and PII that may be leaking between them.

Thank you.

11 comments

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lovelearning
Appending a plus sign and any suffix to a gmail address solves this to some extent. Many unique addresses all accessible from one gmail login, and can be classified into separate folders using filters.

One minor inconvenience I've encountered is that a few services have buggy email validation which prevent such addresses.

[1]: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo...

ancymon
More popular it gets, sooner people will remove everything after the plus for mailing purpose. Actually, that's quite strange my "spammers" aren't doing it yet.
simon_acca
I currently do exactly what you describe, for the purpose that you describe, with fastmail. This feature is called aliases on their system.

I also used to do be able to do it with migadu when I was hosting with them.

The aliases are routed with a longest-prefix-match sort of algorithm, so you can blacklist specific addresses that have gotten spammy by aliasing them to some inexistent address.

ancymon
Catch-all is quite known for that. But the problem starts when you need to respond to some emails using such alias. You then need to setup account for sending which for me is quite inconvenient. Also in case of gmail the alias accounts "leak" the original login in some email headers.
ryanmccullagh
FastMail has this feature. You don't need a service.
ecesena
I assume you have a fakedomain.com, with a * that forwards to your own main email.

If so I'd use a deterministic algo. Examples:

1) (kind of) irreversible: md5(service-domain)

2) easily reversible (for you): aes(service-domain) with a known key

Make sure you don't have pii in your fakedomain.com.

ManageWriters
If you want to pay a company to do this, you could use Fastmail.com.

You can use your own domain, and set up many aliases (there is a limit though). You can also use example+anythingHere@example.com (but you can also do this with other email providers such as Gmail)...

They also have a long list of their own domains (maybe 20-40, I can't remember) that you can use.

Or you could set up your own server with a catch all email address. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-all