- 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:
I just set an equivalent up for myself using a custom domain and a Cloudflare worker.
Since I’m already paying for the domain, it’s essentially free, and I can go crazy with the configuration (using regex to block emails or route them to different accounts).
I even have a bit on my site that randomizes the email people can use to contact me.
the only problem with that approach is that if it’s just you alone using the domain, that’s already enough to track you. even if you used an anonymous registrar, they might not identify you but they can surely track your traces…
Agreed. But in my case it’s less about tracking (especially because with fingerprinting, it’s almost impossible not to be trackable these days unfortunately), and more about knowing who is selling my email to spammers and advertisers.
That’s brilliant! How did you go about doing that? I very much want to do it too.
You can find a few guides online such as https://blog.holtzweb.com/posts/unlimited-email-forwarding-address-aliases-using-cloudflare/ and https://fyx.me/minis/create-infinite-email-aliases-using-cloudflare-email-routing/
I can’t remember which ones I used specifically, but that first link covers the basics; I just set up the worker to be a lot simpler using regex to map a whole range of possible aliases through instead of hardcoding anything.
For the moment I’m routing things to Gmail (I’ll likely shift to Proton at some point), but I was able to set up labels using my templates (specific prefixes and formats) to easily identify emails I get. For example, the stuff that comes from my site gets its own label for French or English stuff (the site is in both languages) because it’s always formatted as
site.{en/fr}.{semi-ranfom-value}@my-domain.com.That’s perfect, thank you for providing those links.
Fastmail is another option that supports custom domains and wildcard addresses. It’s about $5 a month. Once you start utilizing your own domain, you can easily change email hosts if you don’t like one. The hardest part of this process is changing every service from your current Gmail or whatever address because you have to do it one at a time.
Fastmail will be your email host and you can send email using From addresses in your domain.