The real solution: Buy your own domain name, and make a catch-all email address. Every account gets a new address with that account’s company in the email. Target is target@[your domain].[tld]… The benefit is that you can see exactly who is selling your info to spammers, and easily burn those accounts. You start getting spam sent to that target address? Congrats, now you know Target has sold your info and you can set a rule to automatically send any target@ emails straight to your trash. Also, get a damned password manager so every account has a unique password.
Create a fake persona. This persona has a fake name, birthday, favorite food, first pet, etc… Memorize everything about this fake person, or even just make a note about them in your phone. And none of it is real. This fake person’s info is used for all of your signup info. So when shitty fucking companies get hacked and lose all of your info, the hackers never actually got any of your info. And if you ever see spam addressed to that fake persona, you know you can immediately discard it.
Between the catch-all email address and the fake persona, you’re basically immune to all of the typical ads, phishing, data breaches, etc…
You can also do this with dots in various places in your email with gmail. Not as descriptive as the plus sign thing but still can be useful as you can create different filters based on the location of the dots.
It depends on the mail server/provider. As a datapoint, I use Zoho Mail with 4 of my domains and they all have a catch-all that points to a single inbox.
Using Zoho, too. Unfortunately, the free version does not have IMAP or POP3. (Still does hate SMTP, though, which is fantastic for my self-hosted services)
https://www.migadu.com/ is a cheap and reliable one. Used YandexMail for years for free before, but they were shameless about reading the contents of emails and then had the audacity to remove the free tier and demand money for it.
Or better yet try making your accounts for fake characters like Goku or ash catchem so with enough people doing the same thing we can get spammers to look at the data they bought and think hey wait a minute I’ve been scammed
If you set it up as a catch-all email, then anything going to the domain will hit the same inbox. From there, you can set filtering rules to send emails to whichever box you want.
The real solution: Buy your own domain name, and make a catch-all email address. Every account gets a new address with that account’s company in the email. Target is target@[your domain].[tld]… The benefit is that you can see exactly who is selling your info to spammers, and easily burn those accounts. You start getting spam sent to that target address? Congrats, now you know Target has sold your info and you can set a rule to automatically send any target@ emails straight to your trash. Also, get a damned password manager so every account has a unique password.
Create a fake persona. This persona has a fake name, birthday, favorite food, first pet, etc… Memorize everything about this fake person, or even just make a note about them in your phone. And none of it is real. This fake person’s info is used for all of your signup info. So when shitty fucking companies get hacked and lose all of your info, the hackers never actually got any of your info. And if you ever see spam addressed to that fake persona, you know you can immediately discard it.
Between the catch-all email address and the fake persona, you’re basically immune to all of the typical ads, phishing, data breaches, etc…
That’s a massive ballache
Bitwarden can do both automatic email creation and also store the identity(s) and fill them in for you.
So it doesn’t need to be a ballache, can be one-click transparent.
Fyi, this can be done with Gmail as well. Just add a plus sign at the end of your email. I.e. your_email+target @ Gmail.com
Except most companies have wised up to this, and automatically scrub anything after the +. Because why wouldn’t they?
You can also do this with dots in various places in your email with gmail. Not as descriptive as the plus sign thing but still can be useful as you can create different filters based on the location of the dots.
What service do you use for the catch all emails? I use “simple login” currently with my own domain. But, I’d love to look at other options.
It depends on the mail server/provider. As a datapoint, I use Zoho Mail with 4 of my domains and they all have a catch-all that points to a single inbox.
Using Zoho, too. Unfortunately, the free version does not have IMAP or POP3. (Still does hate SMTP, though, which is fantastic for my self-hosted services)
https://www.migadu.com/ is a cheap and reliable one. Used YandexMail for years for free before, but they were shameless about reading the contents of emails and then had the audacity to remove the free tier and demand money for it.
I have one of the yearly deals on MXRoute. Unlimited domains. Been using them for almost 3 years.
Or better yet try making your accounts for fake characters like Goku or ash catchem so with enough people doing the same thing we can get spammers to look at the data they bought and think hey wait a minute I’ve been scammed
Or just stop buying useless products that demand internet access when they dont need it, and stop making those accounts.
How do I make a spam email address using my own domain name?
If you set it up as a catch-all email, then anything going to the domain will hit the same inbox. From there, you can set filtering rules to send emails to whichever box you want.
How do I set up any email using my domain name?