As for the cost, a .eu or .de domain cost ~10€/year, which is pretty negligible to me.
.DE domain cost $4 on Porkbun or Spaceship, and there’s discount for new registration.
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I need to so my research on custom domains, because it’s they are indeed cheap (5-12€ yearly). But are you supoosed to create those 150 adresses manually or do you use just one email adress? Am I supposed to self host my email?
The price bump is not significant, but is it convenient for the security measure that I was looking for? Creating an account on the fly with an hide-my-email so it wouldnt be associated with me. Maybe I need to reconsider (even though this hide-my-email feature doesnt work on every website)
You could do either. The point they were making is that you’d have to update each account’s settings (e.g. Google, Amazon, PrivacyGuides, etc.) to change to a new address if you change email providers. Using a custom domain makes it so that you can simply update the domain to point to a new host, and all *@yourdomain.com emails still get where they need to go.
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I do, but you certainly don’t have to. The reason I do not is:
- It introduces another entity handling my emails that I need to trust and that can fail.
- I don’t really need it.
I have my custom domain—with catch-all—pointed towards Tuta. I very rarely need to send an email from one of my generated addresses so doing it manually is good enough for my needs.
In my case that looks like:
I create an account I in Bitwarden, using their username generator to create the email.
Until I need to send an email from that address that’s it, it’s done.
If I need to reply, I go to my inbox in Tuta, go ~4 levels deep in the settings, create the new address, and then I can send my email. This part is admittedly a bit tedious, but I only do it once or twice a month at most, so it’s good enough.
Some downsides and risk with this setup are:
- Since it’s all manual there’s always a risk I’ll forget to create/choose the correct address, and instead answer from my default email. But perfect anonymity is not really a part of my threat model so the consequences are negligible.
- Because Tuta is not designed around this use case, I eventually accrue a long list of created addresses that I every now and then have to clean out manually. Tedious but not frequent enough to matter to me.
- The big risk with having catch-all on, is that you could be flooded with spam emails very quickly. So far that hasn’t happened in the ~3-4 years I’ve had this setup. I don’t think I’ve even gotten 10 spam emails in total so far. The only real issue I’ve had is that I recently got a few emails with invoices meant for a company whose address differed with one letter from mine.
Using an email aliasing service solves pretty much all the issues with my setup, so if you’re okay with another cog in the email chain I’d probably go with that. My needs are simple so I’m fine with a simple solution like this. If you want a smoother, more automated workflow then go with something like Addy/Simplelogin.
You can, but as Privacy Guides says on the email self-hosting page: “Mail servers require attention and continuous maintenance in order to keep things secure and mail delivery reliable.”
As @PaleCrow55 said, the advantage of having your own domain is that it puts you in control. Which I’d argue improves your security by itself. Also imagine if every time you moved, in addition to updating your address, you’d also have to change your last name. It would be a mess.
That is one of the downsides worth considering with having a domain only used by, it can/does potentially identify you a lot easier. But you can do both. Your domain for important stuff you’d need to bring with you, the default aliases for the stuff you don’t.
All that said, I think the smoothest (and most secure) setup, in both the short and longterm, is using a custom domain with an aliasing service. It’s likely what I’ll eventually move to. At some point.
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