Roast my e-mail strategy

Hey,

So I am in the process of trying to move away from my all-purpose e-mail into a more organized and compartmentalized strategy.

I came across this blog on e-mail hygiene that I thought was interesting and designed a strategy based on it.

The results are as follows:

[initial][Surname][number]@gmail.com | Personal (friends/family only)
Firstname.Lastname @gmail.com | CV and job applications
Firstname.Lastname @proton.me | Banking and Fintech
[Random word][number]@gmail.com | Social media (exc.YouTube)
[Random word][number]@gmail.com | Shopping (Amazon, Aliexpress, courses)
Email 6 (+Simplelogin Alias) | Other websites – newsletters, forums, etc
Email 7 | Government entities
Email 8 | GooglePlay (purchases) and YouTube
Email 9 | Outlook (for Microsoft software e.g. Designer, Teams and Co-pilot)
Zoho | Business e-mail
Recovery e-mail 1 (ideally has a hard-to-guess username) | Receiver of ALL 2FA requests
Recovery e-mail 2 (ideally has a hard-to-guess username) | Recovery e-mail for Recovery e-mail 1

ALL E-MAILS MUST HAVE 2FA! - ALL MUST POINT TO Recovery e-mail 1

Now, let me address the elephant in the room: Yes, they are all Gmail or Outlook except for one Proton free account. The reason for that is I’m not as concerned about privacy as I am about security, and as far as I understand Google is good for security. Additionally, this setup would be too expensive if using paid options.

Now here’s the thing: These are 12 e-mails, and I wonder if I went overboard a bit with this setup. I have no idea how difficult this could become to manage over time. I assume the bulk of my e-mail will just end up in 1 or 2 of these e-mails and most of the others will stay somewhat dormant,

I expect to have all of them on my FairEmail app, but I also understand I need to give them some use, otherwise Gmail will terminate them.

So I’m open to suggestions. Is this too much? Would you remove some, add some? Could the fact that all my e-mails depend on recovery email 1 be a security risk in case that e-mail becomes inaccessible for some reason? Any other thoughts? I’m all ears.

Kind regards.

Have you considered just 1 main email and alias’ for the rest? I am having a hard time understanding the need for all these other emails.


My suggestion

Main email: Firstname.Lastname @proton.me | Personal (friends/family only)

Purchase a custom domain for ~ $15/year use that for

  • Banking and Fintech
  • CV and job applications
  • catch-all

Everything else, use SL to create an alias for. SL also will integrate with your custom domain. Making all this easy to manage.

I think you may need SL premium for this. So total it would be like $50-60/year

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Hi, thanks for the comment.

I don’t understand how that would work. 1 custom domain would give me 3 e-mails (1 banking, 1 CV, 1 Catch-all)? How? I suppose I would also need to use some third-party e-mail provider like Fast Mail, right?

The custom domain would act as another alias domain. You could have unlimited alias emails from it.

The point of using it would be for professional and financial purposes since a custom domain is unlikely to be blacklisted and you can have the domain be something like @lastname.com or @yourbusiness.com which is useful in a professional setting.

“catch-all” is a term / setting you can toggle in SimpleLogin. This allows you the option to use any example@yourcustomdomain email and it will automatically be created through SimpleLogin. This is handy if you want an alias but don’t have the time to manually create it.

For what I am suggesting, the catch-all might not actually be that useful now that I think about it.

No, you would just add the domain records as shown on the SimpleLogin “Add a Custom Domain” page.


In summary you would have

  • 1 email provider (Proton) - for friends and family
  • 1 alias provider (SimpleLogin) - alias emails for all subscriptions and services that do not need to be tied to your identity
  • 1 custom domain - for alias’ that already know your identity such as business relationships and banks

This way you can manage all your emails through SimpleLogin and can easily turn off and re-create an alias that ends up in a data breach.

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