this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Long time back I used to use a spam email whenever I needed one. Then services started declining emails from those services, so I made a temp Gmail I used for everything. But I'm not comfortable with how much I use that.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago (1 children)

SimpleLogin,
to generate email aliases for permanent personal accounts and forward the mails to an undisclosed private main mail adres:
https://simplelogin.io/

Temp-Mail,
to generate email adresses for temporary throw-away use cases:
https://temp-mail.org/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

aimple login is a blessing

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago

I use https://10minutemail.com/

If it's blocked and I don't care enough use my normal email, the site isn't worth it imo.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I use Firefox Relay (@mozmail.com) and so far I've been able to use it everywhere I wanted to.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Don't you have to pay for the premium to get more than a few redirects?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

You do. I roughly pay $1/month.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What do you mean , you get 5 free rekat addresses, you can use it, however many times don't you*?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

No it's 5 free emails rerouted, you have to subscribe after that which is why I bailed. If I misunderstood that I'll have to look at them again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Okay what I do is I use one email id for multiple crap things , so that way one type of crap comes only via one email id

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Sure, I may have been confused when I started doing it then, unless I'm misremembering I tried to have it send to the same Firefox alias and it said I only had 3 left after the 2nd email.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Sign up for a domain at a registrar and get hosted email. Setup a catchall address (as in anything @yourcomain.com gets delivered. Make up addresses as needed. By setting to [email protected] each time you know which companies sold your info.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That's what I do with Google Domains.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'll just add heavy emphasis to properly configure this, because otherwise anyone can use your domain as a catch-all host.

Which is how scammers hijack domains for sending spam and other content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I think you're thinking of an open relay, not a catchall mailbox.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How about duckduckgo's email alias service? It allows you to send and receive without exposing your actual email.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What might be a deal-breaker is that you can only reply to others' emails, others must send something to the @duck.com address first

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You don't need to wait.

The format is [email protected] for sending emails.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

oh you're right lol, thanks

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

The absolute best way costs a small amount of money.

First get a hosting plan. DreamHost has the “Shared Unlimited” plan for $13/mo. (Cheaper the first year, and cheaper if you pay for 1yr. or 3yrs.).

Next get a domain name. I recommend NameCheap. This costs like $14/yr. Most (but not all) domains have free anonymized registration.

You can then either use the mailbox space on your hosting or create forwarders to something like FastMail or Proton. Just make a new [email protected] address each time you need one. Blackhole it if it gets too much spam.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The hosting provider is unnecessary.

You can point the domain to proton mail or whatever email service you like. Then you can configure a wildcard so that all email sent to any address at that domain can go to a central email.

Then you can filter it and use rules to move or delete automatically. Minimal setup required, and nothing to do to "create" a new email address.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah, you can do it that way. I mentioned the hosting in the case that they’d like to use mailboxes created on the hosting account rather than FastMail/Proton/etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

And if that's too many steps, Fastmail already has the ability to create masked emails!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I like Addy as it allows to create mail aliases which relay to your real mail. So you cen delete the alias as soon as it gets spammed.

If the free tier of the website is to restrictive for your uses, Addy is hosted by other FOSS supporting platforms and their limits vary.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

One thing to keep in mind is that if you say that your email address is at some throwaway email site, that throwaway email site has access to your email and can probably pretend to be you, can probably get control of your accounts elsewhere, as email is often used as a way to authenticate someone in the event of a forgotten password. That may not matter if you're just going to sign up and use a site once and then forget about it, but I'd be more-hesitant about using it for anything where you intend to use the thing on an ongoing basis or where there's anything sensitive associated with the thing.

Honestly, this would be a useful service for ISPs to offer. Like, temporary email addresses. Mine gives me a number of them, plus webmail access to them, but it's still a bounded number, not really intended to create one address for every possible remote location.

thinks

Abine.com used to provide proxy stuff for email addresses and credit card payments and SMS texts, hide your real identity from the other end, forward to your real one. They aren't free, though, or at least their credit card masking service isn't. I dunno if they're still in business.

checks

Yeah, though it looks like they now brand that service as "IronVest".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IronVest

https://ironvest.com/

Another issue is that a lot of websites that want to harvest email addresses block throwaway email domains, use services that can identify them.

It also creates problems for some places that don't care about harvesting email addresses, but do want to avoid bots, and try to block throwaway domains as well. For these, they make the assumption that an email address is an "expensive ID", something that one can't readily create a lot of. This is probably not a very good assumption, but, for example, a number of lemmy servers do this at sign-up. It'd be better to do something like a CAPTCHA or require a payment or something instead, IMHO...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I often use Guerrilla Mail and mail.tm

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Outlook allows an email address to be a day or so in service before they ask you for your personal info.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

mailinator.com was one of the originals, still seems to be working

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Spamgourmet

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Here's another just in case, maildrop.cc

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I use Firefox Relay, the premium version is 12€/year and it's easy to set up and use.

They have plans to offer phone number protection too in the future, I'm on the waitlist.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I just created a junk Gmail account that I use for everything that I don't care about and never login into. Why does it matter "how much you use it"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I use StartMail, useful for both one-time emails and aliased emails that stick around.