Solved: Thanks to all who commented, especially those who took the time to respond to my follow-up questions. Your responses were enough to convince me of the value of buying a custom domain in order to keep one’s true email address private w/ the added benefit of working on websites that block known domains of temp/forwarding service providers.
Key takeaways:
- Forwarding services’ shared domains are useful for blending in w/ the crowd. (credit to @Cricket@lemmy.zip)
- Custom domains are handy when you don’t care about blending in and you want to use a website that blacklists known domains of disposable/forwarding service providers, including the paid-tier domains.
- Deciding whether to enable catch-all:
- Enabled: You can make up new addresses without having to configure the alias manually each time, but it’s also easier for spammers to guess valid addresses.
- Disabled: It’s more difficult for spammers to guess valid addresses, but you’ll have to configure your aliases manually unless you have regex matching for automatic creation of new aliases. With regex matching for automatic creation of new aliases, disabling catch-all has few if any downsides.
- Regex matching: Seems to provide the best of all worlds by making it harder for spammers to guess valid addresses without having to configure aliases manually each time.
- For aliases, including a string of random characters after the company name makes it harder for spammers to guess your other aliases and/or learn where else you have accounts by spamming emails to every
$companyname.comand seeing which ones bounce back. (credit to @erebion@news.erebion.eu)
Original post:
I’ve recently signed up for an email forwarding service w/ aliases so that I can keep my true email address private when I sign up for new websites and services. I should clarify that I’m less concerned about concealing my identity as I am about protecting my real email address, identifying who leaked my info when my email address is compromised, and being able to stop the spam by turning off that alias.
While updating my existing profiles to point to aliases instead of my real address, I’ve hit a snag - some sites (Steam, Slack, etc) won’t allow me to update my email address to any known domains from my email forwarding service.
On these sites that block email forwarding addresses, for now I’m either updating my existing email address w/ a plus sign if the website allows it, otherwise I’m just leaving my existing email address unchanged. It’s not the end of the world, they already have my real email address, and I can probably go a Very Long Time without needing to check those inboxes anyway, but I’m still miffed that I can’t completely migrate my existing accounts to my new scheme.
I’ve read numerous posts about the benefits of custom domains to enable portability of email service providers, and I’m wondering if custom domains are the answer to these sites that disallow forwarding addresses, but I have questions:
- How do other people deal with this situation?
- Do these websites that block known email forwarding domains typically work on a whitelist or blacklist model? If the former (whitelist), then I’m thinking a custom domain will have the same problem, but if the latter (blacklist), then I reckon a custom domain with catchall might work.
- Particularly owners of custom domains, do you find your custom domain is allowed more often than not or do you run into the same problem?
EDIT: Clarified my objectives.
I’ve seen this approach mentioned in other threads. Where does one configure catch-all, is that in the settings for the mail provider or the domain registrar?
Its a setting on the mail server/provider.
Don’t use Catchall, this can lead to a lot of spam, as ANY address on your domain will be accepted, making it even easier for spammers guessing valid addresses.
I’ve never had issues with it, been using it for years.
Gotcha, so then without a catch-all, is it still possible to make up something on the fly or will I need to predetermine my aliases before I give them out? I guess it’s kinda rare, but I’m thinking about the odd circumstance where I need to come up with something on the spot and I’m away from my computer.
I’ve never had spam issues with catchall, and it saves a ton of time vs having to go create aliases constantly.
I’ve once enabled a catchall in addition just to test and got spam, then I turned it off again. Seems you got lucky. Overall if you use catchall and later run into spam issues, it gets much harder to get rid of it, as you cannot turn off the catchall if you don’t even have a list of aliases to still let through.
If the forwarding/aliasing service automatically creates an alias when the first email is received, then that skirts this problem, right?
No, it cannot know for sure whether the first email is spam.
I see the problem now; however, if the aliasing tool has regex matching (and the matching pattern is hard to guess), then I believe that solves the problem of keeping spam out while enabling automatic creation, would you agree?
Probably, but building all that takes far more effort than adding an alias. Or many.
Well, in my case I just add an alias to my mailserver each time. Your mail-eage may vary.
I don’t want to use plus signs as that always let’s anyone kow what the real address is.
I forward those emails to an address which is random. For example: udhxhdjeiwk@example.com
This address is never used anywhere. So I know all emails appearing there aren’t spam but from the original sender.
Each alias looks like this: company_name-[eight random character/numbers]@example.com.
If I ever get spam, I simply delete my account at the company, as they had leaks (I often know way before Have I Been Pwned) and delete the alias. This way I have no spam (only on my personal address, which I hand out).
Can you elaborate on the benefit of using a random string for your secret/true inbox? Is it so that if it’s ever compromised you can just spin up a new random string as your new inbox, point all your aliases to the new one, and burn the old one?
Same question, how do the random characters after the company name benefit you? Is it so that if you want (or need) to continue using that particular service after a data leak, then at least you can update your profile to company_name-[different set of random characters]?
Something obvious like “inbox@” or “hello@” would get a lot of spam, a random string does not receive spam as spammers usually do not send anything to my random string. :)
I doubt it’ll ever get compromised, as I don’t use this emailadress anywhere. It’s just internal for my emailserver. I could also have it drop that all in a specific folder of my personal emailadress, but that’s how I’ve set it up. Should I ever receive spam there, I’d set up a new random string and fix my aliases to point there.
But again, highly unlikely that this should become necessary.
No, it’s just so that I receive less spam. Imagine you use corp@example.com at a website, that gets leaked. Someone could have the idea, looking at this, that they could use this to find out where you have accounts by seeing whether emails get rejected from the mailserver or not and they could also just flood you more easily by just sending thousands of emails to every $companyname@example.com.
For a short while, I had it without, but this way I got some spam, which is solved now.
Okay, I think I’m following, thanks for the detailed explanation.
Nice!