Do you use a different one for everything you sign up for online? Only social media?
In: Technology
It’s just a service where an email address “forwards” to another email address with the stipulation that both are hosted by the same company.
Example: you are [email protected] as the “real” email address, but you can also create [email protected] and they’re actually the same mailbox. Mail sent to either one ends up in the “real” joe mailbox, so you only have to login to one mailbox.
On a personal note, yes, I make a unique alias for every single thing I sign up with. It’s a bit annoying, and when some company employee IRL asks me for my email address I just refuse because setting up an alias is obviously impractical and I’m not doing it. In exchange, if junk mail starts showing up, I know who had a data breach or who sold me out, and have the option of calling them out or deleting the alias.
They are different addresses that end up sending email to the same place. They are useful because:
* You can e.g. give an organization a particular alias and then filter all email that comes in via that alias to a folder for that organization.
* If you get spam, you can tell who gave your info away by which alias it arrived with. Useful if all those people you emailed said “we don’t sell your information”, but someone clearly did.
When should you use them? Google Mark Robinson for a textbook case of not using the same email address for everything
I use Firefox Relay. What I do is everytime I want to sign up somewhere, instead of giving them normanyeetus (at) gmail.com, I create a firefox email on the fly named after the thing I sign up on, for example ubereats (at) nm.mozmail.com. The mails sent to that are automatically forwarded to my main email, but no one sees my main email. These “mask” emails can be created, deleted and forward blocked on the fly. Pros:
1. No one knows my main email, leaked masks can be easily deleted and no spam is received.
2. When an email mask is leaked, if you named them right, you can actually know where the leak happened. If I get spam on facebook (at) nm.slp.mozmail.com, it means Facebook had a leak or someone found my email adress on facebook.
That’s just the pros I saw in that service, I’m sure there’s more
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