- 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:
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.