Welp I guess this is the perfect example of companies not deleting your credentials and account info when asking for it… I deleted my Notion account several years ago. And completely randomly today got an email from them about data retention, assuming this is one of those “important” emails they have to send out. Sadly, years ago I wasnt using email-aliases like I am today, so still stuck with them having my email. Fuck I hate this so much. Thought I’d just share this lesson, use alises my friends!
tell me more about how you use aliases.
you just using a new one for every service?
Back when I used self hosted mail, I wrote an extension that requested a new alias based on the domain of the website.
Like website.net_d5g4j8@mydomain.com
If the site got compromised I would update the random characters.
I still have 800+ aliases left over from this. But after moving to hosted mail I never updated the extension.
Surprisingly little known fact, email addresses actually have the concept of aliases built in (and it’s relatively well supported despite being a bit niche):
your.email+some.alias@gmail.com
Will end up in the inbox of
your.email@gmail.com
But will retain the alias in the To field
The downside is that if a sender is particularly shitty it could detect this and remove the alias again.
This is what I use today. However spammers can easily remove the plus address to send email normally so isn’t quite so effective.
What frustrates me is so many websites strip the ‘+’ from the address, either as inline JavaScript or even worse, after submission.
Note: not every provider supports this.
Also, gmail addresses ignore periods. my.email@gmail.com and myem.ail+service@gmail.com will end up in the same inbox
Yes indeed, password managers have the option to do this, at least Protonpass and Bitwarden. While Bitwarden you need to connect a third party email service. But it’s relatively easy, especially with Protonpass as it will automatically suggest to do this when you create an account somewhere.
Yes, exactly like that.
I’ve had companies just not respect your opt-out preferences. I’ve seen regularly they add new email categories (presumably maliciously) so that they can continue spamming you.
Less commonly they will sell your contact info to third parties
With an email alias you can simply disable that address, and any emails sent to it will be bounced back to the sender.
Also keep in mind that email is one of your main personal identifiers (PID) on the web. When data mining companies buy up information from various sites and services, they use it to link together your activity in order to expand your profile.
With self hosted email and at least Proton Mail (and probably other paid solutions), you can set up a “catch all” address. With that, any non existing email gets redirected to one; for me, I have spam@domain.com so, while myname@domain.com goes to my inbox, thisaddressisinvalid@domain.com and, I don’t know, walmart@domain.com both go to spam@domain.com. I don’t need an individual entry for every alias and I can specifically block any address that’s particularly spammy or compromised.
I hear that you can have a similar setup with something called SimpleLogin, but I’ve never tried that.