The real solution: Buy your own domain name, and make a catch-all email address. Every account gets a new address with that account’s company in the email. Target is target@[your domain].[tld]… The benefit is that you can see exactly who is selling your info to spammers, and easily burn those accounts. You start getting spam sent to that target address? Congrats, now you know Target has sold your info and you can set a rule to automatically send any target@ emails straight to your trash. Also, get a damned password manager so every account has a unique password.
Create a fake persona. This persona has a fake name, birthday, favorite food, first pet, etc… Memorize everything about this fake person, or even just make a note about them in your phone. And none of it is real. This fake person’s info is used for all of your signup info. So when shitty fucking companies get hacked and lose all of your info, the hackers never actually got any of your info. And if you ever see spam addressed to that fake persona, you know you can immediately discard it.
Between the catch-all email address and the fake persona, you’re basically immune to all of the typical ads, phishing, data breaches, etc…
Commercial email providers will typically provide some number of aliases aimed at doing this for you.
Proton Mail’s a popular provider in Switzerland, for example:
https://proton.me/mail/pricing
Their $3.99 /month service provides 10 aliases.
Their $9.99 /month service provides unlimited aliases.
And will work with a domain you own, so it’s not like you’re locked to them if you want to move to somewhere else down the line.
Abine (now IronVest) just sells the privacy aspect. They aren’t an email provider – that is, they don’t give you an email box – but provides this “masking” service to forward it to your regular email provider, if you already have email service.
Their $39/year service provides 50 aliases.
Their $99/year provides unlimited aliases.
They also do some other stuff like provide masked phone numbers that forward to your real number. They have provided masked, temporary credit card numbers with charge limits and a bogus name and address, so you don’t even need to give your real name to someone you purchase something from online (though it looks like that’s currently not available, says that they’re bringing it back. I have used a masked credit card number from them in the past, so I know that at least some merchants will accept it, though I’d think that it’d tend to trip anti-fraud stuff at merchants, but…shrugs).
That being said, while I think that this sort of thing is a way to reduce the increasing degree of data harvesting – you can’t always choose whether-or-not to use certain services – I think that if you have the option to choose a product or service that doesn’t harvest data on you in the first place, that’s really a better option.
Fyi, this can be done with Gmail as well. Just add a plus sign at the end of your email. I.e. your_email+target @ Gmail.com
Except most companies have wised up to this, and automatically scrub anything after the +. Because why wouldn’t they?
What service do you use for the catch all emails? I use “simple login” currently with my own domain. But, I’d love to look at other options.
It depends on the mail server/provider. As a datapoint, I use Zoho Mail with 4 of my domains and they all have a catch-all that points to a single inbox.
https://www.migadu.com/ is a cheap and reliable one. Used YandexMail for years for free before, but they were shameless about reading the contents of emails and then had the audacity to remove the free tier and demand money for it.
That’s a great idea! The fake information won’t work for things that require real information, but it’s otherwise great! Is there any retaliation you can take against companies that sell your information? I guess you could forward all of those emails to their sales address.
If you set it up as a catch-all email, then anything going to the domain will hit the same inbox. From there, you can set filtering rules to send emails to whichever box you want.
