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Comment by MattDemers | Hacker News Reader

>Some extras: use unique email addresses per site if you can. Some setups allow infinite aliases. Then you can blackhole one that gets leaked, and you can know where it got leaked from.

If you pay for ProtonMail, you get a SimpleLogin Premium for free, which makes the creation of dummy/alias emails a lot easier. They're owned by the same company.

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> If you pay for ProtonMail

These are free for all-

https://relay.firefox.com/

https://duckduckgo.com/email/

I've been using alias addresses since forever, though with Tutanota, not Proton (due to cost & nice app). It's great when you can simply deactivate an address and the spam stops coming.

That sounds nice. I use bitwarden's "plus addressed email" generator I think it's called, the downside being that I need to specifically blackhole anything that bypasses the plus-addressing, or it'd be easy for anyone that actually looks to bypass.

There still is the chance that some spammer will figure out that "blah+any-random-string" works for my email, but I'll deal with that if someone bothers someday. I'd just need to add an allow-list or something probably.

Yeah definitely; the "+" alias is built in to most emails (like, it works on Google/Proton at least). I'm more just saying that if you pay for ProtonMail (and therefore care about privacy more than the average person) you get another service for free that doesn't expose your "real" email if someone cared to look.

Someone can look at joe+spam@joeschmo.com and figure out Joe's "real" email address. Something like SimpleLogin (sorry, not a shill for them, I swear) gives you a completely new email/domain (and lets you set up your OWN domains), which then forwards to your proper inbox.

Yeah it's definitely a better pattern, I hope more companies create something like it. I think I heard Apple is doing something similar maybe? I seem to recall Fastmail has one too, pretty sure I saw it in the bitwarden settings last I went in there.

Apple does this with email forwarding aliases on your phone; I can sign up using a generated Apple relay, which then pushes to your main email. I don't like it that much, mostly because you're still kind of locking into the Apple ecosystem, though.

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