i was considering getting an email aliasing service (tired of my actual email getting tons of spam), but i’m curious what exactly people use it for. for example, would you use the actual email for say your pw manager, your 2fa manager, and your bank?
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Simple for me: I never use my direct personal email, ever.
Everything goes through the aliasing system because of the convenience to just turn off the thing at any time.
I even do have my own domain name, but same there: I never use it[1].
To me, email is only for robots: 2fa, notifications, whatever non-human interaction.
For news and people to follow: RSS feed.
For actual messaging: Signal.
Keeping things isolated and reducing chances of me getting phished.
Also, I feel like it’s better to go to some app and pull the info myself when I want to expose myself to it (like visiting this forum) rather than having it being pushed on me (like a notification from a browser/email).
I should even delete the
MXDNS records if we’re honest ↩︎
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I never use my actual email. Proton Unlimited gives me 10 real email addresses but I always use an alias. Real emails are better but I need to remember to switch, whereas the alias system automatically replies from the alias if I recieve an email to it. Associating an alias with a contact automatically uses that alias if I want to email them from scratch. Real emails are useful for professional settings like a business card where you expect it to be shared around.
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My “main” is just really an address to route all the incoming alias to, the real inbox with storage with login password. Never used that address anywhere and everything gets a unique alias per service and website.
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Composing email replies, typically matters of general correspondence or support ticketing systems.
My email gets shared with my alias service and nothing else. Paid email services often have a number of alternative email addresses and I may use one of those for Addy when I change providers thereby never sharing my main address with anyone.
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Ive never heard of an email alias being used as cause for penalty from a bank. But you’re right that they already have so much information, you stand to gain almost no privacy/anonymity from a disposable alias.
It’s a good use case for a custom domain alias imo
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Agree with the custom domain alias.
The same goes for other accounts that will naturally be tied to your real identity (like medical, insurance, government, etc).
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Actual e-mail for the keystone: password manager because I’m too lazy to self-host
Alias for literally everything else. The last data breach that effected me was [electric company][randomword]@[emailaliasservice].com
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I’ve never had this issue in the USA nor Canada. Everyone gets an alias from one of my custom domains. I don’t have “an email” I have 1,200 emails. In fact, having a unique alias per site/institution has saved me so many times from phishing and other stupidity. I’ve also detected breaches long before the bank/financial institution/govt agency even know about it.
Trust nothing. Alias everything.
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I never use my main mail address, I have the option to use 30 aliases in my main mail, also used all 30 before I switched to SimpleLogin. Since then, I only use aliases and all main mail aliases are disabled.
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Curious. Do you all give your main email address to the password manager and/or alias service. Or do you use built in aliases to give them so that absolutely no one but the email provider knows the main mail address.
This seems kind of problematic because you may get locked out of your password manager for not knowing email and locked out of email (to check alias used) for not knowing password. 
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that was along the lines of what i was thinking when i originally posted this question, sure it would probably be better for privacy to alias everything, but i feel like it creates circular dependencies that may create bigger issues than privacy if you were to lose access to stuff
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I never use the same alias twice. Utilities, insurance, healthcare providers, busineses, national government, local government. Whenever I’m asked for an email I’ll create a new one on the spot. If the person is watching me I’ll explain what I’m doing and why. They can’t complain.
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Each of my parents has a seperate email alias for me 
My dad said I’m an idiot. Now everyone is on the Proton Family plan 
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I do store all my aliases into a local Keepass yes.
I never forget my Master password, hence nothing circular and nobody knows my real email.
I myself tend to forget the exact address because of how rarely I need to re-login into my main email inbox.
Only issue I faced so far is when I’m in a dead zone with no public WiFi.
I do not use 5G, hence I cannot create an alias if no Internet and sometimes it’s problematic if I do not have one ready ahead of time.
But yes, I do not trust anybody to hold my data safe and sound.
Hence rather not spread it more than needed and leave everybody with an alias.
Quite unrelated but for family, I recommend Addy and its way to easily broadcast an alias to forward it to X mailboxes easily. Works great if you don’t want to share/forward an email all the time but have:
- movies ticket, forwarded to the brother + sister + mother
- taxes, forwarded to the dad + mom
- Steam, forwarded to the brother + sister
- want to make a surprise gift to your family on the shared alias account?, forward it to yourself only and write a sneaky description like “garbage tax”, nobody will come and ask what it’s for
Makes it very streamline and cool to use (all of that while using aliases only).
Was hacky and quite hard to achieve with SimpleLogin…hence was a deal breaker.
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I carry several generic aliases and empty cloud storage hyperlinks printed on paper. This is pointless for most people but I find it useful. When asked I deny that I’m even carrying a phone, although it is often the truth. If they have Signal I’ll give my username. Nobody gets my phone number.
The hyperlinks are printed on a machine which isn’t associated with me. There is some risk it could be retained in the printer memory but aliasis don’t matter that much.
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As in S3 upload buckets?
Definitely cool and useful IMO. 
I thought of something similar but the opposite way to have a way to copy something sensitive 1 time from a temporary endpoint. For example to copy something sensitive on an environment where I cannot login/use my account in a safe way.
Can feel weird but been there myself. People look definitely quite weird at you. 
Planning to host it publicly on my website with a QR code to make that one even easier for people not having the app.
Extra if you live in US. 
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A password manager should be a local “app” that does not require an email or even an Internet connection.
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Proton Drive can create sharable links with optional passwords and expiry dates. The hyperlinks are complicated and difficult to guess, so I have experimented with url shortening services. I don’t need to trust the third party service since they don’t know the password.
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