I’ve recently been working to minimize my email clutter, my dependance on certain email providers, and to consolidate services under certain accounts.
I’m down to the following uses:
Apple ID, mydomain-billing/subscriptions, mydomain-official/legal, anon, friends/family, business domain.
I also have a handful of aliases and an account just for newsletters and my RSS app.
I’m curious if others have several email addresses for similar uses or if you use your email client to categorize incoming messages for you. For people who only have one email address, how do you manage this?
I create unique email addresses for every organisation and service I deal with, including an obfuscated date, so when an address is compromised I can nuke it with a hard rejection, and regenerate as needed. This all feeds into a catchall mailbox, with server-side sieve rules to filter the stuff I actually care about.
I besides some account specific and burnt addresses, I don’t actively track of any of the addresses I’ve created, it would be in the hundreds by now.
One benefit of this crazy setup is there’s one less common identifier to match across disparate data stores.
Finally, no one should do any of The above. From experience I consider it pathological.
i started to create separate email aliases for every newsletter, account and contact like >10years ago. i still have some few aliases that i shared with friends so these are spread more wide. some of these aliases turned out to be useful as in the platform i created it for lost my data, i got some phishing mail and told the platform admins about their data loss, i then just stopped spam by changing that one single email alias. that happened i think four times.
this year i wanted to get rid of old domains and had to go through all of the aliases there, which turned out to be >400, that was a lot of work, but my setup turned out to be quite a good documentation about what accounts i’ve set up during that period. some accounts were for platforms that do not exist any more, many for platforms that changed owner (mostly without notice) while some accounts turned out to be stuck like i cannot even delete them, because if i try, that platform freezes the account for “weird looking actions” looks like they just do not want to follow the laws.
overall i think of maybe improving usability by platforms, (free)email providers and also newsletter senders, then creating some specs and try writing RFC style definitions and write a proof-of-concept to make “handshake” and email addresschanges possible and easy for endusers in large scale while achieving the same level of filterless spam protection that i have now.
when i find the time to do it.