alt Hacker NewsThe problem is if someone figures it out and starts sending you spam to {random}@domain.tld. That's when you will need to sit down and start creating actual aliases for all those used email addresses and stop the catch-all forwarding:)
Also, another downside is that you will loose privacy by using your own domain.
And the lack of privacy makes targeted scam/phishing more likely, and targeted scam is the one we are most susceptible to.
All in all, I am not saying this is bad idea, in fact I am doing it myself, just pointing out this is not so black and white.
Using iCloud solves those problems, but puts you at risk of getting your account banned and loosing access to those emails, so there is that.
Probably best way to deal with it is to get dedicated email domain with a bunch of your friends, and hook it up with something like SimpleLogin. But that's gets complicated quickly ;)
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> Also, another downside is that you will loose privacy by using your own domain.
Not really no. You can absolutely create a domain using bogus WHOIS information. No one will bat an eyelid.
I've found using a subdomain helps with that, spammers will try [email protected] but won't bother trying to brute force subdomains.
However be warned some surprisingly large websites don't support subdomains, for example eBay will silently send [email protected] to [email protected] and you'll only figure it out by looking at your server logs for rejected mail.
In those cases I have to specifically alias that [email protected] to the subdomain.
With this new Apple privacy subdomain maybe eBay will finally fix this.
I have run this for years with very little problems. And I can honestly say that have not found anyone writing to addresses I did not give them at their domain. Simple as this is, it is way to niche for companies to figure it out and exploit it. And if that really was a problem I'd just create a new subdomain.
If you are worried about privacy, get a domain just for this. Use domain privacy and dont host other things there.
Yes, some sites whitelist domains or dont allow subdomains. For those I'll use another account - or a firefox alias or something. But 9 out of 10 work fine.
I am not a fan of alias services since materializing names takes discipline. How many do you make? Maybe there is a limit of 50. When do you share them across services? My guess is many people just create 2 or 3 aliases they use for everything - which defeats the purpose. Sure, it masks your personal address, but once one gets compromised, you find it basically served as your personal address anyway.
I also dont really keep track of most of the names I use. Since most are one time things that I would never use again, like to sign a waiver or something. But I mostly stick to '{domain}@' for the names. So my nytimes account would just be nytimes@, which is predictable when I need to recover it. I used to use addy.io for this, but it was not as good since it had account limits and I had to manually manage every alias. Much easier for me to just create a mail filter to sinkhole an old name. Of course I have never really needed to do this anyway.