I’m seeing lots of people subscribing with their real email address to different newsletters or random websites that they might use once in a while.
For a couple of years I have run a proxy SMTP that I kept to forward emails to my real address, as a privacy measure.
People tend to use the “+” sign in order to identify if their address was sold, for example signing up with “michael.john+amazon@gmail.com”, now what most do not realize is the fact that when selling data to third parties, most companies parse their email lists and clear our those “+” sign. (Source: I have worked with companies that do that)
I found the relay from Mozilla to be massively useful in this case, so if anyone is interested, have a try with it:
As a side not: If you’re using firefox, it integrates nicely into your browser, right clicking on a field and selecting “Use relay mask” is enough to generate an instant address so you can easily rotate them for each service.
Proton offers that too.
Can’t recommend https://addy.io/ enough, I have been selfhosting it for some time now and have not had any complaints
Main issue for most users with the selfhosted version is that the ISP might be rotating IP addresses, most might have awful reputation or straight up blocking SMTP ports. I was lucky not to have any of those issues, but I have seen many such complaints. :(
But yea, self hosting is the way if possible, if not, a free services like mozilla’s relay might be the best fit.
Email Schuld be self hosted on a vps or bar Metall server
Again, if your internet provider doesn’t do its best to prevent you from doing that, which most do.
Am I missing something? Hosting providers like hetzner should never do this?
That being said, email hosting can be difficult, for many reasons, so this is clearly not for everyone
I meant self hosting as in hosting it yourself, at home, on your homelab, with your own network. Residential networks tend to block SMTP ports and IPs usually have horrendous reputation, most being blacklisted.
Hetzner, OVH and other hosting providers do not use residential networking. :)
There is also an option to use an email provider that offers proper email aliases, like runbox. This way your real email address (login username) may never reach the internet.
People tend to use the “+” sign in order to identify if they address was sold, for example signing up with “michael.john+amazon@gmail.com”, now what most do not realize is the fact that when selling data to third parties, most companies parse their email lists and clear our those “+” sign. (Source: I have worked with companies that do that)
same here and it always felt like this useless tidbit was intentionally fed to the public.
