
What if emails had disposable aliases? - jfny
To help keep things anonymous and to regain control.<p>For example: I could go to GMail and click &quot;Generate new disposable alias&quot; or whatever.<p>It would give me something like mUa8cDjyBJyCi@gmail.com which I could use anywhere.<p>All emails would still go to my main email. I have the option to reply to any emails from my alias or from my real email.<p>If a disposable alias gets compromised I can delete it. It would be hard to keep track so I assume there would be a search feature where I could type my alias in, and then click delete. Still keep my old email.<p>This is better than current aliases as email+alias@gmail.com still exposes your real email, which you can never delete, only create new, meaning people can spam you forever.
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Someone
Except for the fact that it ties you to Apple, not Google (in your
description, Google could still link all your aliases together), what you
describe is very similar to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_in_with_Apple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_in_with_Apple).

If you want to prevent that, a way to do that is by having a personal domain,
and have all mail sent to whatever email addresses at that domain you want
this to happen for forwarded to your personal domain.

~~~
Normille

      >..a way to do that is by having a personal domain, and have all mail sent to whatever email addresses at that domain you want this to happen for forwarded to your personal domain.
    

Been there. Done that. It doesn't work.

Having a catch-all email address like this just generates mountains of spam.
There are spammers out there who will just carpet bomb domains with likely
sounding email addresses in the hope one turns out to exist;
admin@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, abuse@yourdomain.com,
sales@yourdomain.com, ceo@yourdomain.com, personnel@yourdomain.com,
management@yourdomain.com... etc. etc.

With a catch-all email on your domain, you'll end up getting all this spam
-multiple times over!

~~~
Someone
I wrote “email addresses […] you want this to happen for”. That list can be as
open or restricted as you want it to be.

~~~
Normille
Aye. But then, every time you want to create a new address, you have to go
into your email admin/preferences/whatever and add that new email address as
another alias. It soon ends up being a lot of work, so the tendency is [or was
when I foolishly tried it] to just tick the "catch-all" box –with spam
avalanche results.

~~~
Someone
That could be automated, and would make things as easy as what the OP
described (could be as easy as “when I enter a new “from” address, add it to
the list”)

~~~
Normille
Automation would definitely make the process less painful. I'm struggling to
see how it could be done though, unless you're running your own mailserver.

I use Google email servers[0] [or 'Gsuite' as it's now called] to handle email
for some of my domains and Yandex email for domains [1] [or 'Connect' as it's
now called] for others. In order to create a new email account, or add a new
alias, it involves logging in and clicking through a few screens of admin
section. I'm not saying it couldn't be automated but I don't think it would be
easy.

If anyone has done something like this, please share some tips!

[0] [https://gsuite.google.com/](https://gsuite.google.com/) [1]
[https://connect.yandex.com/](https://connect.yandex.com/)

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sova
>For email uses, a textual encoding of a hashcash stamp is added to the header
of an email to prove the sender has expended a modest amount of CPU time
calculating the stamp prior to sending the email. In other words, as the
sender has taken a certain amount of time to generate the stamp and send the
email, it is unlikely that they are a spammer. [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash)

------
jfny
You could then take it a step further by ONLY allowing emails to your aliases.
Not to your main. So you can basically eliminate spam mail completely.

