What is a good place to get multiple single-use email addresses?
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.
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 companyyouresigningupwith@yourdomain.com each time you know which companies sold your info.
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 something@example.com address each time you need one. Blackhole it if it gets too much spam.
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.
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.
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”.
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…
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.
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