[C4K3]

I've been doing this for close to a decade and sometimes salespeople and customer service people will ask to confirm, but that takes 5 seconds and isn't awkward (in my opinion.)

It has more benefits than knowing who leaked your email, it lets you easily filter your incoming email by who you gave the email to, and when your email is leaked it lets you shut off that email address. Of course you can also filter your email by the sender's domain, but that isn't as consistent, and doesn't help at all when your email address has been leaked.

It's true that you do have to set it up so that you can send email from the addresses to avoid not being able to reply by email, and you will want a password-manager or something to remember exactly what email you used, for convenience.

Personally I'm glad I've done this, it's made it much easier to organize my emails.

[gowld]

Moreso, it's good to teach people that valid email address are in fact valid.

This part:

> Especially since all these companies ask for and verify your cell phone number

is true, though.

and

> The one outlier is political campaigns: they'll share your email till the end of time.

Because politicians exempted themselved from anti-spam laws, as they do with most laws.

[lazyjeff]

> Because politicians exempted themselved from anti-spam laws, as they do with most laws.

This was the most puzzling thing to me. The politicians that I saw on TV as adamantly pro-privacy, anti-tracking, who made a lot of sense in everything they were saying -- you contribute a single dollar (because they want to show grassroots support for their pro-individuals campaign) and they IMMEDIATELY give your email and survey responses to everyone in their party, including to state-level campaigns in places across the country.

There was no indication on the donation form that any of my personal details would be used for anything except to show that they had a lot of grassroots supporters.

Not only that, but their emails are so clickbait-ey like "lazyjeff, you are the reason that [hated politician] is destroying democracy."

[autoexec]

> Because politicians exempted themselved from anti-spam laws, as they do with most laws.

Tons of companies will share/sell/buy your email address. Politicians just stand out because they're shameless about spamming, but email addresses aren't always used for spamming. They can also be used to tie logins to names and accounts across services. They can be harvested for various information they contain. Even folks with just one email address often give away their name, the year they were born, their hobbies, etc. Using an email address like [e-mail] and [e-mail] also tells a story about you and what services you use. Every scrap of data that can be collected helps build a profile of your life and email addresses are a part of that, even when they aren't used to clog your inbox with garbage.

I'd recommend using less obvious names, but I still don't see a problem with creating unique addresses for various services that demand an email account. If nothing else it's a great way to compartmentalize the crap they'll send you (spam or not). If someone questions why you have [e-mail] that should really just be a 2 second conversation.

[willk]

I couldn't agree more. I've been using a catch-all for probably 12 years now. Sure, sometimes you get a second look when you give an email that has the business's name in it, but who cares?

I get the benefit of blocking mail coming to me forever, doing fast sorts and searches, never have to worry if the company doesn't like a + in my email address.

[scoot]

I use 33mail.com (33m.co) for this which gives you a personal subdomain for free, or a private domain on the paid plan. I'm on the (super cheap) paid plan due to mail volume, but haven't found the need for using a personal domain.

I find it zero effort having a unique email address per site, and when combined with unique (algorithmic) password gives effectively a unique identity per site (cookie sharing aside, but there are solutions for that.)

As a result, I have been able to call out a couple of sites for data breaches, and continue to see npm spam in particular. Worst offender so far is Pipedream, an absolute embarrassment for their CEO who appears to have initiated the data scrape. I won't be surprised to see them sued out of existence, which is a shame, as I like the service in general.

[couchand]

> you do have to set it up so that you can send email from the addresses

Fastmail's webmail allows you to specify the sending email address for a catch-all mailbox in the message composition page, so there is no additional setup there.

[hamburglar]

Edit: oh god, leaving this in place for posterity but I am completely misrepresenting fastmail here. It is protonmail that I recently tried and had these limitations. Apologies! How embarrassing. Also, I have no idea why the child comment correcting me would be so downvoted. It’s apparently correct.

Yes, but fastmail has a couple dealbreaker limitations when doing this: First, you can’t originate mail from that address; you can only respond. This makes it unusable for a lot of mailing list control messages and other systems where you are required to make inquiries from a registered email address. Second, you must explicitly set up each of the unique recipient addresses, which is a huge burden when you want to be able to generate them on the fly when signing up for web accounts (and when you already have hundreds in use because you’ve spent decades giving every company a unique address).

If they addressed these and I could have an unlimited number of suffixes directed to a single fastmail address, I’d sign up for a paid account in a heartbeat. Looks like a great service but those are fatal flaws IMO.

[rootusrootus]

And it conveniently pre-fills the from address with the correct one if you reply to an email which came to an alias.

[brewdad]

I have a single address, [e-mail] that I use as a throwaway and then route it to a folder to review about once a week. It draws a chuckle from salespeople when they ask for it or see it pop up in their system.

[NonNefarious]

Eh, I did it for a while and while I think the OP overstated the "awkwardness," I didn't find that the effort was worthwhile. I only caught one entity selling or otherwise divulging my address: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, oddly enough.

Oh, and someone did hack some FAA database and mine it for addresses.

But that's all I netted in several years. Beyond my main address at my own domain, I keep a Gmail address for mailing lists and other low-grade traffic.

[Brian_K_White]

So basically, yes it's a bit of extra work, but simply worth it.

Life without it is worse than life with it.

[kornhole]

Agree. This also creates additional challenges for data brokers when trying to tie together datasets about you.