I like to try websites out before tying my identity to them. How do you do it? Simplelogin? I honestly won’t manually make a new gmail for every new website I try and I to want the option to see what emails I get.
I like to try websites out before tying my identity to them. How do you do it? Simplelogin? I honestly won’t manually make a new gmail for every new website I try and I to want the option to see what emails I get.
I host my own Simplelogin instance and generate a new address for every service. Combined with Bitwarden, I now have a unique address and password combination for each account.
I… did not know you could self host. Well that's neat.
I’m still not clear on the value proposition of simplelogin.
I seem to get the same thing with a domain and a catch all address.
How do you reply to emails to your catch-all?
Hit reply.
This is why I just moved from protonmail to Fastmail. With Fastmail I can send from arbitrary addresses using my domain. Why it’s not that simple with proton is beyond me and now that I’ve tested everything with Fastmail these past few weeks, I see it’s a choice.
I almost signed up for simplelogin but realized I was being sold something that should just be included. Plus setup was convoluted as fuck.
Meanwhile Fastmail is intuitive so far.
But in some cases you don’t want to use arbitrary addresses, but the exact same that was used to send you an e-mail. For me this is necessary and Simplelogin hides my real e-mail address. Additionally, I can with ease deactivate addresses and minimize spam by a lot.
I can reply from ANY address from my domain including the exact one that was used to send me an email.
I can “deactivate addresses” by sending messages to a particular address straight to trash with rules.
Edit: turns out Fastmail has a masked addresses feature built in, separate from a catch-all. It’s basically simplelogin built in, if you want to enable it. Proton is looking more and more overpriced.
And when those addresses wind up on mailing/spam lists and they're coming from multiple places, you're screwed. That's why email forwarders became a thing, catch-alls aren't new, but you lack the control most want with them.
Plus, Proton does support plus/+ addressing, which does the same thing as a catch-all. You know the email addy it came from.
If I were a professional spammer, the first thing I’d do to clean the address list I have is to strip out plus addresses. It’s a simple regex.
On how to filter, I can send any address straight to the trash apparently just like simplelogin. I’ll know who sold or leaked my info because it’s in Bitwarden and I can just search my vault to see who I handed that particular address to.