- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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 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)
I found the relay from Mozilla to be massively useful in this case, so if anyone is interested, have a try with it:
You can find a few guides online such as https://blog.holtzweb.com/posts/unlimited-email-forwarding-address-aliases-using-cloudflare/ and https://fyx.me/minis/create-infinite-email-aliases-using-cloudflare-email-routing/
I can’t remember which ones I used specifically, but that first link covers the basics; I just set up the worker to be a lot simpler using regex to map a whole range of possible aliases through instead of hardcoding anything.
For the moment I’m routing things to Gmail (I’ll likely shift to Proton at some point), but I was able to set up labels using my templates (specific prefixes and formats) to easily identify emails I get. For example, the stuff that comes from my site gets its own label for French or English stuff (the site is in both languages) because it’s always formatted as
site.{en/fr}.{semi-ranfom-value}@my-domain.com.That’s perfect, thank you for providing those links.