- 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:
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.