Ask Lemmy

I use Proton, and they own SimpleLogin, which generates email aliases.

SimpleLogin email aliases point to your email address, and if you respond to any emails sent through simplelogin, it replaces the "from" field on your outgoing email with the address you used as an alias.

The simplelogin browser plugin tags all of your aliases with the domain of the site you're currently on(so if you go go lemmy.world and click on the "sign up" link, once you're on the sign up page, you click the simplelogin browser extension, and it will generate an alias to use for signing up for lemmy.world and will tag it "for lemmy.world", so you know where you used that alias). So the moment you start getting spam to any simplelogin email alias, you just go and disable the alias, and you know EXACTLY who gave your email address to a spammer.

Firefox relay. Its like $1 a month and I can create as many throw away alias as I want. I do have that feature with proton but i like how generic the mozmail alias is and it gives me a way to support firefox.

I think Port87 may be what you are looking for.

"Sharing a different address with every app or service keeps them from tracking you. If a company leaks your email, you can easily change a label’s address and block the address that was leaked, preventing spammers from reaching you."

I don't think there are any trackers or data collection. The developer/owner of the company is on the threadiverse (@hperrin@lemmy.ca) and their is a !port87@lemmy.ca community. Perhaps they can confirm. @hperrin@lemmy.ca?

It has a free tier, but that tier only allows you to receive email, not send. Cheapest sending email account is $0.99/month.

You said you don't care about the country, but for completeness, their contact info has a San Marcos, CA, USA address.

I use it and really like the "sub-emails" I can make for each type of email or per company.

Your first and last points are indeed mostly incompatible. Tuta (free) is an option, however they have been known to close free accounts for being unused. Mailbox.org is what I'd recommend, it's very cheap (a few dollars a year if I recall correctly) and allows for catch-all inboxes if you have your own domain. That means you can have emails like "shoeshop@yourdomain.com".

Alternatively to the domain, you could pay for something like simplelogin, which allows you to create and manage unique email addresses which forward to your actual email if enabled. It's how I determined the source of a past data breach before it was even publicly announced.

Personally, and perhaps oddly, I have a paid Tuta account with simplelogin forwarding to it, and then I also have a mailbox.org account which simplelogin also forwards certain emails to. That's because Tuta requires you to use their own client, and they do not have api level access (that I know of), so my package tracking automations have to use mailbox.org via imap instead.

Personal domains with custom emails. For email provider I use mailbox.org, which does allow custom domain mapping. The domain and email provider combo won't be free but shouldn't cost a lot

It's a lot easier to deal with corporate spams if all of them are emailed to, say, advertisements@example.com or shopping@example.com, or something more on the nose. Paired with a password manager and it is possible to tell exactly which service is leaked, if I'm neurotic enough to assign randomly generated email names

I use a different email alias for every single company that all forward to my single email account. Services that I recommend are Addy.io or SimpleLogin

In a weird way the most private email for shopping/spam you can have is gmail/icloud/outlook, since signing up to websites with any obscure email is instantly going to make you stand out. Use some alternative frontend like thunderbird and the only data google will have on you is the services you signed up for, which google will have anyway since any shopping site is using google tracking in some way or another. Use your actual email (mailbox, posteo, etc) for real contact and google for looking like a "normie" to already privacy invasive sites

I use hitthebricks@shoplocal.com

I use my personal domain name with Zoho mail. It's like $15 a year for their 10GB plan so not free but very cheap. I have it set up so literally anything@mydomain.com goes into my inbox, and I can set up folders with rules if I want. It works very well for me, and from the limited research I did their privacy stance is good, but that wasn't a super big deal for me or else I might have looked at Tuta more as the next best thing. I think I shied away from them because Zoho supports 3rd party email apps and I think with Tuta you have to use their app.

DuckDuckGo offers a free email aliasing service through their mobile app (available on F-Droid).

I've been meaning to do some research on setting up an email server, but it's been a big enough project to get itself sidelined for the moment. From my understanding, it's extremely difficult to maintain the reputation required to have your emails deliver reliably, so I'm considering setting it up so I receive all my own emails directly and then use some sort of relay so I can leverage their reputation for the few meager emails I'll send in a whole year. I just gotta make time to figure out how to set it up...

Proton.me is free and privacy respecting, and they have aliases, but inbox size is relatively small on the free tier.

You could also use duckduckgo aliases with any email provider

Tuta and Addy.io. I paid for both with Monero.

It’s not free, but it’s easily worth it IMO. Get a domain such as FUcorpoTrash.wtf or whatever you consider fitting. Get Tuta mail, and set it to use a catch all email in that address. When you need to sign up with some Sketchy Store, you just make a new sorting rule for them. Everything they send to sketchy_store@FUcorpoTrash.wtf gets automatically sorted into the appropriate folder in your Tuta mail. I would recommend making a new address for every site. Takes a while to set up, but you’ll be able to control your email just the way you want.

I use Proton which comes with SimpleLogin for email aliases. Then you can have one inbox but not only can you easily filter out the spam but if you're careful you can prove who sold it. If you generate an alias and use it only for Reebok, and then you get an email to that address selling you socks you know it was Reebok that sold you data to Big Sock.

I use my own domains, so I create alias addresses as I need them and I can just as easily delete them.

I have my email client sort incoming stuff into folders by those addresses to keep all shopping spam separate from my actual communication.

Fastmail, it’s such a solid service. It is paid, because if it were free it would violate ask #1 from you

You’re not going to find free + no data harvesting

If you have a spare domain or something, you can use faivelo, you'd get with them unlimited mailboxes and aliases so you could make a mailbox or alias for each provider you signed up with, and that way keep track like if you saw the netflix@yourdomain.com email pop up somewhere you would know whos been snitching

Mail service has become so important nowadays, it makes sense to think about paying a couple of bucks for it. I use mailbox.org for many years now, and it is excellent. It I buy stuff I just create a new alias like localhorst-shop24@mailbox.org. They also have the option to create temp mails.

There are some other features I like and use frequently, my Calendar I connect via CalDav, a free video conference tool, a file storage I can use to share files with third party (think of nextcloud light).

Posteo. For me, a big part de-googling, was also ensuring that the amount of emails that I get is reduced.

Mailbox.org

I pay for it to have more spam accounts. Free gives you like 5 secondary addresses. For $30/year I get 25 secondary addresses.

Edit: they support multiple ways to pay so you can separate your payment info from your account.