It’s good to set up and host email for awhile to more deeply understand how it works, but do it for a domain you don’t plan to use for important emails. Then, when you’re sick of it, add that domain to your Fastmail or other hosted account with a deeper appreciation for what the modest annual fee is buying.
When you’re sick of it, you can just filter randomsite@hello.example.com to the trash.
Doing this allows you to generate more or less random throwaway emails at the moment you need them, from a normal domain without any prior setup.
I consider this to be one of Fastmail’s killer features.
That's great because occasionally email parsers on sites/apps don't accept emails with the + in them.
Sounds good for throwaway emails and not using personal info, however overall, this still has a few problems:
- your accounts on different services can easily be cross referenced in the event of a data leak, etc. They will all have @hello.example.com.
- if you actually use hello@example.com for something important, that will be gleaned as well (worse, this is true even in the event of a data leak/hacker on a single service) since this rule/feature you explained is common knowledge.
Seems the only way to overcome that is use a separate custom domain for any site you want to completely isolate, or a custom alias or new email on a major service for each.
Because at least one reason for doing the aliasing is privacy, and by using the same domain for multiple services, even with a different 'name' (before the @ sign), you are offering the companies ability to cross reference to other sites they partner with/have a data leak as to how users are using the app. Worst, if you do use your real name within one of the services, you would potentially be revealing that anyone who uses @mydomain.com is that person, even if you didn't give that other service personal data within their app. Sure a malicious party could expect mydomain.com hosts many users, but you kind of make it obvious it's a catchall by doing things like using randombusinessname@mydomain.com.
Thoughts?
One solution is manually making a new alias @fastmail.com for each service you want to give a unique email.
Edit: spelling
Edit: found the answer on https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html
100 + 1 for every user in the account. That should be sufficient for most use cases.