How to make a non-personally identifying email address that could work for Meetup

Questions
1

I want to use Meetup to meet people near me, but whenever I tried using a Proton address, I didn’t get a confirmation email, and when I tried to use an alias, the alias got blocked, citing “inappropriate behavior.” I think the confirmation email con somehow detect that it’s being forwarded. When I tried using my personal email address, it worked immediately, but I’d rather not use a personally identifying address, and I couldn’t find an option in my Meetup account settings to opt out of data sharing and sale.

My two ideas are to:

  1. Go to a public library and create an anonymous gmail address on one of their computers, then add it to the Thunderbird client on my personal computer, which I’m pretty sure I’d need to do in order to sign in on my computer. But I’m not sure if adding it to my personal Thunderbird client will deanonymize it.
  2. Use a custom domain name, preferably a one used by a lot of other people, but I don’t know if I can use one that’s already used by other people. This idea came from the replies to this post.

In that linked post, one of the replies from a PG team member said that a service that rejects Proton addresses doesn’t actually understand privacy and security and shouldn’t be used, but I’m not sure I have a choice here. Alternative services are unlikely to be anywhere near as popular, and it would be much harder to find in-person connections.

2

Using SimpleLogin (via Proton) worked fine for me when signing up to Meetup (signed up a few weeks ago). I use a custom domain though, would recommend getting one.

3

Does that require purchasing one from a domain registrar, or does the paid SimpleLogin service make it easier?

4

Yeh you need to purchase one. I got one from cloudflare.

Look for the unpopular tlds such as .me, .org etc, and find a cheap one

5

How much technical knowhow is needed to do it? When I saw that Proton requires me to enter some line of text into some provider console, I began to feel like setting up a custom domain name might take more knowhow than I have

6

You don’t actually need an account to use meetup.com unless you’re interested in events that require a RSVP. For that purpose, I’ve had the same issues using SL and even Tuta addresses from Mullvad Browser, but I haven’t tried it with any other browser.

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