- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
I’m seeing lots of people subscribing with their real email address to different newsletters or random websites that they might use once in a while.
For a couple of years I have run a proxy SMTP that I kept to forward emails to my real address, as a privacy measure.
People tend to use the “+” sign in order to identify if their address was sold, for example signing up with “michael.john+amazon@gmail.com”, now what most do not realize is the fact that when selling data to third parties, most companies parse their email lists and clear our those “+” sign. (Source: I have worked with companies that do that)
I found the relay from Mozilla to be massively useful in this case, so if anyone is interested, have a try with it:
As a side not: If you’re using firefox, it integrates nicely into your browser, right clicking on a field and selecting “Use relay mask” is enough to generate an instant address so you can easily rotate them for each service.
Mostly its been great. A few sites are blocking it as an alias now. In other words you can’t use it to create the email. I wonder how long it will last.
Yea I did encounter something similar, except that website was only accepting gmail addresses and yahoo if I’m not mistaken. I had been running with it for about 3 years now. Currently I am also trying unbox.at, as someone recommended it and seems quite nice, except that its so easy with relay because I just right click and fill a field. But I will create an addon for unbox.at.
Its been a mix of websites for me. It is clear that some are catching on to mozmail domain being a passthrough.
I have a few domains and can create as many emails as I want so that is my fall back.