Email strategy with aliasing and custom domains, tips are welcome

Privacy Questions
1

This might not be the best place to ask, but here goes:

I am trying to revamp my email strategy and regain some privacy in the process, as my previous popular email service provider accounts have become untrustworthy after many years.
Thinking about moving to a new email service(proton?) and using an aliasing service(SimpleLogin?).

Q: am I being too paranoid, could I simplify this?

—————

My email strategy going forward:

3 custom domains:

  • known identity : x @known .com
    - contact with banks, govt, etc
  • business 1 : x @biz1 .com
    - contact with clients
  • business 2: x @ biz2. com
    - contact w/ clients
    ———
    NOW, I want to use aliases for my accounts but don’t want to use my own domains for this purpose as I don’t want to let services have this info.
    —
    SO, I would create 5 xtra mail addresses that would handle all the logins and services which in turn forward to my own domains.
    ——
    X,x2,y,z,s @ mail. com
    Which each would use aliases.

SKETCH:

— x

— known
	— contact
		— x @ known. com
	— service
		— x @ mail. com (forward to @ known)

— biz 1 & 2
	— contact
		— y @ biz. com
	— service
		— y @ mail .com(forward to @biz)

— unknown identity
	—Service
		—important 
			— z @ mail.com
		—not important
			— alias (forward to z @ mail)

— rsvp/xtra/temp
	— Alias => s @ mail.com

Thank you for your time reading this.

2

I’m not sure if I really understand your setup, but I’ll tell you what I use/recommend:

1 Proton mailbox, no aliases or custom domains in Proton

Custom domains added to SimpleLogin account:

  • known.com in SimpleLogin
    • Bank 1 gets [random alias x]@known.com
    • Bank 2 gets [random alias y]@known.com
    • Govt 1 gets [random alias z]@known.com
    • Any service you really care about gets [random alias]@known.com basically
    • etc.
  • biz1.com in SimpleLogin
    • [Random alias]@biz1.com for each internet service Biz 1 uses
    • One alias with a good name (or a catch all) @biz1.com to hand out to clients
  • biz2.com in SimpleLogin
    • Same setup
  • SimpleLogin’s alias domains
    • [random alias]@[random domain] for internet services you don’t care about

All these aliases get forwarded to the single Proton mailbox, which has an email address that you never hand out. And you can use filters to organize them by folder based on domain or whatever you want.

(This assumes you want a single mailbox, if you want separate mailboxes for biz1/biz2 you could do that as well I suppose)

4 Likes
3

Thanks for your reply and tips! That was my first plan : )
However I’d like to disassociate my custom domains from the services since the businesses etc are linked to being a public figure.
.
The accounts have been breached in the past, having the company name
in the email address connected to a service would be a future inconvenience.
.
Therefore I thought it would help if I had a protonmail address (with an alias per account) foreach custom domain address, so they just forward.
.
SO: Service => alias => x @ proton . Tld => x @ ownDomain .tld

4

The jump to a proton domain address before going to your own custom domain address seems a little pointless if you’ll be using proton to manage your mail anyways, no? If an account was breached, I don’t see how the extra hop could prevent anything from being found out that wasn’t hidden without it.

1 Like
5

That’s a valid point. Some services, seem to limit functionality or downright block the account if it thinks the user’s email is spam by using an alias account, setting in motion a whole ordeal of proving your identity not being a bot defeating the whole purpose.
.
Therefore I thought It’d be great having x@protonmail. Com to subscribe to services as it would still allow me to use these services whilst keeping my domain off their servers.
.
Fav solution would be:
Alias@alias. Tld => x @ownDomain . Com

6

My setup is I self-host SimpleLogin (an open source email alias tool), you can also pay $36/yr for it too

But it gives you a chrome extension, iOS app, etc. and all the emails would forward to your main. It’s nice because you would have an email that’s “facebook.3sdfj@simplelogin.io”

You can have a separate alias for each service (which is what I do) and it helps me figure out which services are sharing my email broadly and where is my spam coming from (Ticketmaster was a culprit, a surprising one was MBA programs, they sell your application email to other universities)