I’m trying to de-Google, and that means finally getting off of Gmail. I need a new email address for shopping/corporate spam. Where should I park all the emails I get about coupons, shipping updates, new product features, policy changes, etc.?
Considerations:
-I don’t want to just give all my shopping data to another big AI company. (So, not Outlook/Microslop.) I don’t want a provider that will sell my data to third parties, either. These emails don’t need top-level privacy protection, but random third parties don’t need to know whether I buy cheap or expensive shoes.
-I’d like to use email aliases for different companies so I can figure out who’s the leak if I start getting emails from an unexpected source. (Although maybe that can be a separate service from the email provider?)
-I don’t care what country the email provider is based in. I don’t care if the CIA can theoretically find out what shoes I buy, I just don’t want businesses giving me higher “personalized” prices because of those shoes.
-I’d prefer to stick with a free email provider if possible, but maybe that’s not compatible with the first point, IDK.
Suggestions, please!
I use Proton, and they own SimpleLogin, which generates email aliases.
SimpleLogin email aliases point to your email address, and if you respond to any emails sent through simplelogin, it replaces the “from” field on your outgoing email with the address you used as an alias.
The simplelogin browser plugin tags all of your aliases with the domain of the site you’re currently on(so if you go go lemmy.world and click on the “sign up” link, once you’re on the sign up page, you click the simplelogin browser extension, and it will generate an alias to use for signing up for lemmy.world and will tag it “for lemmy.world”, so you know where you used that alias). So the moment you start getting spam to any simplelogin email alias, you just go and disable the alias, and you know EXACTLY who gave your email address to a spammer.
Do you pay for the additional email features? Proton seems to limit the “free” email option to a maximum of 10 aliases.
I do pay for the additional email features.
I came to strongly distrust Google, because Google scans your email and uses it to build a profile on you so they can know everything about you.
It gives them a lot of power, and they sell that information to others for marketing, but it’s particularly dangerous in the current environment.
Proton is worth the cost.
My only complaint about this is that if you need to email the company first off there isn’t a way to do that.
You HAVE to reply to an email in order to use that address. No new emails can be composed with it. At least as far as I’ve ever seen.
You can send an email as the alias first if you go through the Simple Login interface. It will generate a specific ‘to’ address that you can use.
Oh awesome. I will have to try this. I honestly have only gone to the simplelogin UI itself one or two times (usually just use proton itself or the browser extension.)
Thanks!
Personal domains with custom emails. For email provider I use mailbox.org, which does allow custom domain mapping. The domain and email provider combo won’t be free but shouldn’t cost a lot
It’s a lot easier to deal with corporate spams if all of them are emailed to, say,
advertisements@example.comorshopping@example.com, or something more on the nose. Paired with a password manager and it is possible to tell exactly which service is leaked, if I’m neurotic enough to assign randomly generated email namesIf you have a spare domain or something, you can use faivelo, you’d get with them unlimited mailboxes and aliases so you could make a mailbox or alias for each provider you signed up with, and that way keep track like if you saw the netflix@yourdomain.com email pop up somewhere you would know whos been snitching
Fastmail, it’s such a solid service. It is paid, because if it were free it would violate ask #1 from you
You’re not going to find free + no data harvesting
I use my own domains, so I create alias addresses as I need them and I can just as easily delete them.
I have my email client sort incoming stuff into folders by those addresses to keep all shopping spam separate from my actual communication.
I use Proton which comes with SimpleLogin for email aliases. Then you can have one inbox but not only can you easily filter out the spam but if you’re careful you can prove who sold it. If you generate an alias and use it only for Reebok, and then you get an email to that address selling you socks you know it was Reebok that sold you data to Big Sock.
In a weird way the most private email for shopping/spam you can have is gmail/icloud/outlook, since signing up to websites with any obscure email is instantly going to make you stand out. Use some alternative frontend like thunderbird and the only data google will have on you is the services you signed up for, which google will have anyway since any shopping site is using google tracking in some way or another. Use your actual email (mailbox, posteo, etc) for real contact and google for looking like a “normie” to already privacy invasive sites
Posteo. For me, a big part de-googling, was also ensuring that the amount of emails that I get is reduced.
Tuta and Addy.io. I paid for both with Monero.
