Also, do you use disposable emails? What for?

I have a lot of emails made with simple login and I use the same one only for three websites. Then I get all emails forwarded to the same email, and an email for personal use (family, work, friends…) also forwarded to that one. So something like this:

o  o  o     o  personal
 \ | /    /
   |    /
   |  /
   o

I use fastmail with several different domains associated.

  • Personal email shared with friends and family
  • Professional email - not my work but the one associated with my Linkedin and such

I have a custom domain just for signing up to online services. For me, this domain is completely separate and I never use it for anything else. Like nachtigall, I use a naming scheme and a catch-all address. My naming scheme uses their domain plus a random bit like so, twitter.6cruzbms@mydomain.tld.

There are two main benefits to using such a scheme imo. First, it’s harder for data aggregators to collate and cross reference me across the web by using an email address. Second, it acts as a hacked canary and it’s easy to identify the source of suspicious or problematic emails.

The random characters are a pretty good idea to increase security too. Without that part it is easy to figure out what address I use for each service. With the random bits it adds another unknown factor that should make brute force attacks slightly harder. Gonna adopt that too, thanks for the idea!

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