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.
