Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codethief | Hacker News Reader

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It took me a while to figure this out but I've now settled with the following:

- mail@firstlast.tld for personal emails directed at me only and written by a human being, i.e. emails that warrant my personal response

- <SomeServiceIsignedUpfor>@firstlast.tld for automated emails from services like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, HN, …. These are usually computer-generated emails that don't warrant a response, so they are merely notifications.

The neat thing about this approach is that:

a) the list of email aliases contains all the services I've signed up for, ever

b) I can easily stop a service from sending me emails by simply deleting the alias. In particular, if an email address leaks to spammers, I simply delete it.

c) I can distinguish between personal and non-personal email and can prioritize accordingly. I look at my personal emails more often than at my non-personal ones.

Do you have a method for quickly creating new aliases on the fly?

My setup is nearly the same. I use two domains such as firstlast.tld and genericwords.tld.

Genericwords.tld has umbrella aliases for social, apps, subscriptions, orders, etc. I have rules setup up per umbrella alias to delete after 30 days, or always mark as read, or never mark as read.

I originally had service/site specific aliases in mind for easy deletion, but for my setup this creates a layer of friction that makes it quite cumbersome.

I considered umbrella+servicename aliases but those are not always guaranteed to be accepted.

Just use a catchall and you have to do nothing.

You also get more spam, sent to sales@domain, john@domain, alex@domain...

Never once got spam on an email I didn't give out.

Yes, umbrella+servicename sometimes causes issues as I had to learn the hard way, too.

As for me, I use PostfixAdmin (https://github.com/postfixadmin/postfixadmin) to add aliases. Certainly not the quickest method but fairly quick I'd say. Clearly, it'd be even nicer if my password manager created an email alias for new accounts automatically.

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