I’ve been looking at using email aliases services, and right now I’m thinking of using Simplelogin for all my online accounts and accounts where I can change my email easily, and getting my own domain to share with people and where I can’t easily update my email. It seems like I shouldn’t use my own domain for online services because it would be unique and can be tracked.
I did lots of reading about this and am still wondering why someone would want to opt for catch-all domains over aliases. Catch-alls seem highly susceptible to spam and while I haven’t actually done any email aliasing yet, it doesn’t seem to take much effort to make a new alias if you have a plan with unlimited aliases.
Custom domains mean that if the alias provider enshittifies, you can switch to any other provider near-instantly. As long as you never use the domains to host illegal or dodgy shit it’s extremely unlikely you’ll ever lose them — far less likely than losing a gmail or whatever.
With SL you can avoid spam by using the “beta” (been beta for 3+ years lol) “auto create” option instead of a catch-all, meaning that you can direct emails to different inboxes (or do nothing) based on specific regex strings you control — up to 100 of them. I had a catch-all regex (
.*) as my # 100 and it took 2 years to receive catch-all fishing spam. Then I removed it and now have only random strings (e.g..*fgyu.*) so new emails must have them if they want to get somewhere. Everything else bounces. All previous emails continue to work until you disable them individually.I use a mix: