Ask HN: How do you manage per-service emails with aliases?

5 points·lnalx··6 comments

With recent leak of Dropbox, I wake up upon the reality to have per-service emails along with aliases. My current email provider allow me only 3 aliases.

How do you manage your aliases? Which email provider providing a lot of aliases do you recommend?

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I have my own domain for that. Many providers offer wildcard aliases: all addresses not otherwise defined end up in one mailbox and then get sorted into folders (or blocked if the address has ended up on spam lists)

I love what the Fastmail guys are doing in beautiful Australia.

I use their sub domain addressing instead of a + operator. [1]

Example: somename@username.domain.tld. Just like with plus addressing, messages will be automatically filed into folders with a matching name.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html

very cool, thanks for sharing this. I was using the + method with Gmail, but for my own domain, this would be very useful.

The most convenient option is to use gmail and to preface the email address with service name and "+".

So if your email is example@gmail.com, it becomes

dropbox+example@gmail.com

If you dont like gmail, just use it for signups, but as you can have 2FA on GMAIL it is reasonably safe for this sort of stuff.

Some forms does not allow "+" character and I do not think this is the best solution for privacy: Spammers can easily have your root address.

you can replace the "+" with "." for the same effect. Yes spammers can get your root address but they could get that anyway and you would not know where they got it, this way you can block all future messages to that address and avoid that particular service.

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