Your requirements are totally fair tbh.
That said, I think you can use aliases for the use-case you have, you don’t need full addresses. Proton supports “+ aliases” as well, so name+service@domain works, and most importantly they support catch-all addresses if you have your own domain.
I now use actual aliases (the ones from simplelogin), which I generate on the fly, but if you can use whatever@domain and it will be redirected to your configured address. You don’t even need to create this beforehand, so many times I was around and had to give an email address for some reason and I just made up an address on the fly. As long as you use your domain, the catch-all will get the email.
So the 10 addresses only include actual addresses, the ones you can write from. You can have as many as you want to receive emails (which is generally the use case for signing up to services, right?). Just a FYI in case tuta supports the same and you are making more effort than needed!
Yeah, I already do something like <name>-<category>@<domain>, and I’ll probably end up changing <category> to include a + for each account of that type. For example, all banking apps go to <name>-banking, which maakes it really easy to move emails automatically into folders. If I get an email from a bank without that -banking part, it’s spam. I do this with various categories (bills, shopping, etc). I have something close to 10 email addresses right now, and I’ll probably add more in the future.
But basically, I have three domains:
- personal contacts -
me@family-domain- I only give this out to family and friends - work contacts -
me@work-domain- printed on business cards and any services related to my side business - everything else - all of those categories above; if this gets full of spam, I’ll just get a new domain, move my accounts over, and then let the domain expire
So far it’s working pretty well. To get that same setup w/ Proton, I’d need to pay $10/month, whereas it’s just $3-4 w/ Tuta. I’d be okay with combining the personal and everything else, but I really want to keep my work stuff on the same account (low volume, but high priority).
Interesting! That’s very close to this blog post I read long time ago (unfortunately medium.com link)! Are you actually sending emails from those addresses? Like if you need to drop an email to your bank, do you use the banking one or your personal (or something else)?
Fwiw, I do something similar. I use a mix of domain aliases without address (e.g. made-up-on-the-fly@domain.com) and actual aliases. Since I have proton family (and the same when I used ultimate) I have unlimited hide-my-email aliases, so I have it integrated with my password manager, and I generate a random password and email for everything I sign up now. These though are receive-only addresses. In fact, with this technique I probably use 3-4 addresses in total, but I have probably 30 domain addresses that go to the catch-all one.
Spam on these addresses are basically non-existing and you can still create folders based on recipient without having a full address (e.g. bank1@domain.com, bank2@domain.com). You can make folder categorization based on recipient regex and this way you also have the “stop bothering me” option: if some email gets into the wrong hands, you can create a spam rule for that dedicated address. However, my approach is that all of these are used just to receive emails, to send I have just a handful of actual addresses or -if really needed- I can create on-the-fly an address from a catch-all one, send the email and then disable it again (so it doesn’t count towards the limit, but I still get inbound email to the catch-all).
Nice setup anyway!
Are you actually sending emails from those addresses? Like if you need to drop an email to your bank, do you use the banking one or your personal (or something else)?
No. I’ve never emailed my bank, and I don’t think that’s a thing anyway. If I need to contact my bank, I’ll either use their secure messaging on their webpage, or call in.
I’d love to have a random email for everything, and I’m kind of moving that way, but I really like having everything get sorted, and doing it based on the receiving address is really nice. I suppose I could do <prefix>-<category>+<uniq id>@<domain>, but I’ve been lazy so far.
But yeah, it’s working so far. If Tuta pisses me off at some point, I’ll probably switch everything from my “junk” domain to a handful of Proton email addresses with suffixes. But so far, it’s working well enough.
