We should have an email for each website

Why do I receive so many spams?

When this question was asked by my girlfriend (now wife 😅), my immediate answer was “Stop giving away your email” and I suggested creating a secondary email for “suspicious” websites. In addition, using the same email everywhere is like leaving the same footprint on the Internet, allowing advertisers to cross-reference your online behavior, affecting therefore your privacy.

She followed the advice, created a second email and was happy at first. But now she doesn’t even check this mailbox as there are so many spams in it 💁🏻‍♀️.

So creating a second email is not a true solution. She needs more than 2, maybe hundreds. And why not an email for each website? But she cannot go to gmail or outlook to create hundreds of accounts, this is unmanageable. There must be a better way.

The solution, as far as I know, is email alias. An alias is actually a normal email address but all mails sent to an alias will be forwarded to your realemail. Alias acts therefore as a shield (or a proxy) for the real email. An alias can be disabled anytime, making the spams stop.

Nowadays, some websites allow to unsubcribe quickly but a lot of them still make unsubscribing a difficult process. Some wouldn’t even honor the request. And this doesn’t stop the websites from cross-referencing your data with your email being the primary key.

Currently there are several solutions for creating email alias, they might give different names to the email alias though. A quick search on Firefox/Chrome store should give a handful of results. As a founder of such a solution, I would obviously recommend SimpleLogin 😉 but most of the other solutions also work fine.

Let’s make spammers’ life harder with email alias!

Originally posted on https://dev.to/sonnk/we-should-have-an-email-for-each-website-fhh