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Do you use multiple email addresses to organize your mail?

9 points by Vaslo ↗ HN
I have a ProtonMail Visionary account and have access to a bunch of possible email accounts. I'm growing more leery of allowing gmail to search what I do through their service so I want to begin switching over to the other account. That said, I don't want one account which could eventually get overrun with spam. I'd like to keep a main address for Bills/Important stuff, maybe one for shopping, one for blogs, etc. Do you do anything like this? If so, any advice? Thanks!

7 comments

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pwg
I run my own email on a PC in my basement.

Each company that /requires/ an account for purchasing gets an email unique to that company.

This has a few advantages, one, if you so choose, it becomes trivial to sort email into different folders. But beyond that, if company X decides to overrun their specific address with advertising (I would call it SPAM, but the CAN-SPAM law calls it an "existing relationship") and their "unsubscribe" link does not work, then I simply disable that one email address and the SPAM problem is gone.

Also, it becomes abundantly clear which companies sell their email address lists to spammers, and halting the spam again involves simply disabling that one address.

Vaslo
Wow - this is really a great idea. I'm not quite at the self-hosted level that I feel comfortable with my email on my own, but I love the fact that you can see that someone is selling your info via that address.
dau
I am using my own domain with Fastmail for years and can set as many aliases as I want. So I use an alias for every account I have that requires a mail address to sign up. Occasionally I get a spam on one of these addresses and immediately know that the associated service/website had a potential data breach and the address and all my personal data was likely hacked/sold/leaked from there.
Vaslo
I don't know why I didn't think of this.
cable2600
I have different email accounts, each one with their own identity. Not in my real name, as my real name accounts got 85 of them hacked due to password dumps.
kowlo
I have two inboxes: 1) for personal, and 2) for work.

I then have multiple domains and addresses pointing to each one using Google Domain to Gmail forwarding.

Helps me organise things easily as I can easily create a new address, eg hn@kowlo.com, and then if a company I give my email to behaves badly, I can direct that address towards oblivion!

It also means I can switch to a different service in future if I need to.

Pm359
Have you considered a remailing service such as https://simplelogin.io/?

Maybe this could be a good enough solution for your use case (i.e. avoiding potential spam).