[HocusLocus]

Boss move that I learned under great difficulty: a new temporary gmail alias for every jobsearch.

[raddan]

You can take this to an extreme (like I do) and use a different email address for every party with whom you communicate. It makes it rather obvious who leaked your email address, and also easy to shut them out (looking at you ActBlue!). It also leads to some amusing personal interactions. I once rebooked a cancelled flight on JetBlue at the ticket counter. When the agent saw my email she said “wow, you must really like JetBlue.” I just nodded but I was laughing inside because it’s definitely the opposite!

[Dusseldorf]

I do this as well, and occasionally people get confused and think I work for the company I'm interacting with ([e-mail] is close enough to [e-mail], I guess.) I usually don't bother to correct them, in case it gets me better treatment :)

[godelski]

I do this too, though sometimes it leads to confusion.

FWIW, Firefox's Relay integrates into Bitwarden so you can generate emails on the fly when creating new accounts. Downside and upside is that I never know what my email address or password is.

The huge benefit is I can write down an email that'll work because I own @somedomain.mozmail.com and it'll always redirect. I do the same thing with cloudflare because I also own myrealname.com

But honestly I hate all this because the real problem is that email is a bottleneck and it is stickier than phone numbers. But my email is floating around on a bunch of lists because I've had it for years. Frankly, gmail is pretty bad about removing spam. There's a lot of spam I catch using simple filters from Thunderbird.

The extra benefit is that I'm planning on moving away from gmail and all these relays make it easier to redirect everything to a new location. So I still recommend it. You can shutdown addresses that are being abused or shared more easily but that's hard to do with your long term email address.

[Terretta]

Aka iCloud "Hide My Email"

[schrodinger]

As a hiring manager, I just want to give you a heads up that we are getting tons of fake applicants—like 5–10%—that end up being a real person on a video chat isn’t some AI assistant that uses a teleprompter interface to tell them what to say.

Usually by that point you catch them, but your recruiter screen might not etc. So now all the main HR tools are using “age of email” as one possible signal to detect fraud.

I’m sure you’re fine if your email is real (in my experience they all resolve to Onvoy LLC instead of a real cell provider), but just something to watch out for. Wouldn’t want to get overlooked because your email is brand new.

(If you’re curious about motive as I was, since of course it’ll be obvious when you start—in a lot of cases it’s that procuring an offer letter helps you obtain a visa.)

[baobun]

How would you determine or estimate "age of email"? It isn't really public info. Does it imply that you are by now expected to be doxxed by data brokers to not be judged suspicious?

> I’m sure you’re fine if your email is real (in my experience they all resolve to Onvoy LLC instead of a real cell provider),

Email is expected to be resolving to "a real cell provider"? Wut?

[schrodinger]

Edit: “I’m sure you’re fine if your email is real” should be “…phone number”

(It’s too late to amend my comment)

[phyzome]

What does it mean for an email address to "resolve" to a cell company?

[sans_souse]

Stay tuned I have a pretty cool project I plan on launching very soon. It takes the email alias to the next level, using them as meta tags to actually allow users to trace the source of shady data exchanges. I'm working on the guide and I'm hoping to actually start a community effort here to hold companies accountable for responsible use of PII

[iamben]

I'm interested. How does it differ from using:

[e-mail] or [e-mail]

...to figure out where the spam originated?

[Imustaskforhelp]

Hm interesting, do you want to tell why this helps out a lot perhaps?

[HocusLocus]

;) I was a by-invitation-beta in 2004, trust me. Even then spammers knew about the +1234 trick too. The earliest throwaway forwarders suffered from explosive growth and spam netblocks and their queue times varied greatly. The golden age of Viagra and recruiters selling prospect lists to randos. I retreated to gmail for the SPOP and because my original address was Tech Contact for 100+ domains from 1994-2000. Thousands a week. If I was smart I'd have used it as a honeypot to feed a spam blocking service.

[vunderba]

It might be an iCloud+ feature only, but if you're on a Mac - you've already got the ability to generate virtual email addresses on the fly.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078

[wafflebot]

I love this feature and wish something like it would come to Gmail.

I can't rely on iCloud Mail anymore due to its overly aggressive silent spam filtering. Not great if you're trying to log into an account, and you can't receive the recovery emails for that account.

[pram]

iCloud Hide My Email is pretty good for this.

[joshribakoff]

I switched to fastmail, it imported all my gmail mail quickly, and it gives me virtual emails.

[njuhhktlrl]

[e-mail] will certainly end well.