I’m trying to de-Google, and that means finally getting off of Gmail. I need a new email address for shopping/corporate spam. Where should I park all the emails I get about coupons, shipping updates, new product features, policy changes, etc.?
Considerations:
-I don’t want to just give all my shopping data to another big AI company. (So, not Outlook/Microslop.) I don’t want a provider that will sell my data to third parties, either. These emails don’t need top-level privacy protection, but random third parties don’t need to know whether I buy cheap or expensive shoes.
-I’d like to use email aliases for different companies so I can figure out who’s the leak if I start getting emails from an unexpected source. (Although maybe that can be a separate service from the email provider?)
-I don’t care what country the email provider is based in. I don’t care if the CIA can theoretically find out what shoes I buy, I just don’t want businesses giving me higher “personalized” prices because of those shoes.
-I’d prefer to stick with a free email provider if possible, but maybe that’s not compatible with the first point, IDK.
Suggestions, please!
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.
My only complaint about this is that if you need to email the company first off there isn’t a way to do that.
You HAVE to reply to an email in order to use that address. No new emails can be composed with it. At least as far as I’ve ever seen.
You can send an email as the alias first if you go through the Simple Login interface. It will generate a specific ‘to’ address that you can use.
Oh awesome. I will have to try this. I honestly have only gone to the simplelogin UI itself one or two times (usually just use proton itself or the browser extension.)
Thanks!
Do you pay for the additional email features? Proton seems to limit the “free” email option to a maximum of 10 aliases.
I do pay for the additional email features.
I came to strongly distrust Google, because Google scans your email and uses it to build a profile on you so they can know everything about you.
It gives them a lot of power, and they sell that information to others for marketing, but it’s particularly dangerous in the current environment.
Proton is worth the cost.