I’m trying to de-Google, and that means finally getting off of Gmail. I need a new email address for shopping/corporate spam. Where should I park all the emails I get about coupons, shipping updates, new product features, policy changes, etc.?
Considerations:
-I don’t want to just give all my shopping data to another big AI company. (So, not Outlook/Microslop.) I don’t want a provider that will sell my data to third parties, either. These emails don’t need top-level privacy protection, but random third parties don’t need to know whether I buy cheap or expensive shoes.
-I’d like to use email aliases for different companies so I can figure out who’s the leak if I start getting emails from an unexpected source. (Although maybe that can be a separate service from the email provider?)
-I don’t care what country the email provider is based in. I don’t care if the CIA can theoretically find out what shoes I buy, I just don’t want businesses giving me higher “personalized” prices because of those shoes.
-I’d prefer to stick with a free email provider if possible, but maybe that’s not compatible with the first point, IDK.
Suggestions, please!
Personal domains with custom emails. For email provider I use mailbox.org, which does allow custom domain mapping. The domain and email provider combo won’t be free but shouldn’t cost a lot
It’s a lot easier to deal with corporate spams if all of them are emailed to, say,
advertisements@example.comorshopping@example.com, or something more on the nose. Paired with a password manager and it is possible to tell exactly which service is leaked, if I’m neurotic enough to assign randomly generated email namesI use Proton, and they own SimpleLogin, which generates email aliases.
SimpleLogin email aliases point to your email address, and if you respond to any emails sent through simplelogin, it replaces the “from” field on your outgoing email with the address you used as an alias.
The simplelogin browser plugin tags all of your aliases with the domain of the site you’re currently on(so if you go go lemmy.world and click on the “sign up” link, once you’re on the sign up page, you click the simplelogin browser extension, and it will generate an alias to use for signing up for lemmy.world and will tag it “for lemmy.world”, so you know where you used that alias). So the moment you start getting spam to any simplelogin email alias, you just go and disable the alias, and you know EXACTLY who gave your email address to a spammer.
My only complaint about this is that if you need to email the company first off there isn’t a way to do that.
You HAVE to reply to an email in order to use that address. No new emails can be composed with it. At least as far as I’ve ever seen.
You can send an email as the alias first if you go through the Simple Login interface. It will generate a specific ‘to’ address that you can use.
Oh awesome. I will have to try this. I honestly have only gone to the simplelogin UI itself one or two times (usually just use proton itself or the browser extension.)
Thanks!
Do you pay for the additional email features? Proton seems to limit the “free” email option to a maximum of 10 aliases.
I do pay for the additional email features.
I came to strongly distrust Google, because Google scans your email and uses it to build a profile on you so they can know everything about you.
It gives them a lot of power, and they sell that information to others for marketing, but it’s particularly dangerous in the current environment.
Proton is worth the cost.
I’ve been meaning to do some research on setting up an email server, but it’s been a big enough project to get itself sidelined for the moment. From my understanding, it’s extremely difficult to maintain the reputation required to have your emails deliver reliably, so I’m considering setting it up so I receive all my own emails directly and then use some sort of relay so I can leverage their reputation for the few meager emails I’ll send in a whole year. I just gotta make time to figure out how to set it up…
DuckDuckGo offers a free email aliasing service through their mobile app (available on F-Droid).
I pay for it to have more spam accounts. Free gives you like 5 secondary addresses. For $30/year I get 25 secondary addresses.
Edit: they support multiple ways to pay so you can separate your payment info from your account.
Wait, they have a free their now? I’ve been paying for the last 2 years. Very happy with the service they provide though!
Proton.me is free and privacy respecting, and they have aliases, but inbox size is relatively small on the free tier.
You could also use duckduckgo aliases with any email provider
I use a different email alias for every single company that all forward to my single email account. Services that I recommend are Addy.io or SimpleLogin
I use Proton which comes with SimpleLogin for email aliases. Then you can have one inbox but not only can you easily filter out the spam but if you’re careful you can prove who sold it. If you generate an alias and use it only for Reebok, and then you get an email to that address selling you socks you know it was Reebok that sold you data to Big Sock.
Mail service has become so important nowadays, it makes sense to think about paying a couple of bucks for it. I use mailbox.org for many years now, and it is excellent. It I buy stuff I just create a new alias like localhorst-shop24@mailbox.org. They also have the option to create temp mails.
There are some other features I like and use frequently, my Calendar I connect via CalDav, a free video conference tool, a file storage I can use to share files with third party (think of nextcloud light).
Tuta and Addy.io. I paid for both with Monero.
It’s not free, but it’s easily worth it IMO. Get a domain such as FUcorpoTrash.wtf or whatever you consider fitting. Get Tuta mail, and set it to use a catch all email in that address. When you need to sign up with some Sketchy Store, you just make a new sorting rule for them. Everything they send to sketchy_store@FUcorpoTrash.wtf gets automatically sorted into the appropriate folder in your Tuta mail. I would recommend making a new address for every site. Takes a while to set up, but you’ll be able to control your email just the way you want.
I use my own domains, so I create alias addresses as I need them and I can just as easily delete them.
I have my email client sort incoming stuff into folders by those addresses to keep all shopping spam separate from my actual communication.
Fastmail, it’s such a solid service. It is paid, because if it were free it would violate ask #1 from you
You’re not going to find free + no data harvesting
If you have a spare domain or something, you can use faivelo, you’d get with them unlimited mailboxes and aliases so you could make a mailbox or alias for each provider you signed up with, and that way keep track like if you saw the netflix@yourdomain.com email pop up somewhere you would know whos been snitching
Posteo. For me, a big part de-googling, was also ensuring that the amount of emails that I get is reduced.
