- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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 they 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:
It’s limiting, cost-wise. You don’t get many masks for free. Also, you don’t get to pick what the masks are, and you can’t create one on the spot (such as when a business asks for an email address).
A better option: unbox.at
It’s a European-hosted instance of addy.io but without the paywall. It’s run as donationware, and every feature is included by default.
How do you donate? I don’t see a donation button anywhere… (it’s all in German)
There’s a donation link at the bottom. I’m using Firefox’s translation feature, and it works well enough (I don’t speak German, either).
I was just recently shopping around for services that provided unlimited, anonymized (read: not “you-[service]@masked”) options. Surprisingly, none exist for $0 besides the nearly un-discussed Ironvest free plan (maybe it’s not available for new accounts now).
This other option is great, provided they manage to stick around for long enough! I was wondering if an instance of Addy powered by donations was around
They’ve been around since 2014 (part of adminforge.de, which was created by giebel.it), so there’s at least a track record there.