• kitnaht@lemmy.world
    621·
    5 days ago

    I collect these into a database I run locally out of a bad habit I had as a teenager. Back in the AOL days you could ‘Email-bomb’ someone, and rightfully it sounds exactly like it is – you’d just send them tons and tons and tons of email.

    Well, turns out - that’s pretty easy to detect and block. So I came up with a better way, a more permanent way; and probably the reason so many people see their email address as a private/privacy thing now – You simply submit their email address to every known spam address in existence.

    Now, you’ve got an infinite amount of spam being thrown their way, 24/7, at super high volumes, for essentially - what is the entire lifetime of that account. I haven’t done it in the past 20 years or so, and I don’t have any of my old ‘progz’ for it, but I figure one day when I need it again, it will be invaluable.

  • slowbyrne@lemm.eeEnglish
    25·
    5 days ago

    Here’s how I solved email spam.

    1. Create a new email on a privacy focused platform (I chose proton)
    2. Sign up for an email relay service (Firefox relay, SimpleLogin, etc…)
    3. Only give out your actual email to friends and family and tell them not to share it with others or services without your permission.
    4. Change your email on ALL your services to a newly generated relay addresses. Only use relay addresses for any online service moving forward.
    5. Monitor the old email for a while to find any important services you might have missed.
    6. When you get spam from a relay address, you can decide to use the normal unsubscribe option, or the nuclear disable relay option. That’s it.

    Bonus 01: since your changing all your services manually, you can decide to delete accounts you don’t need anymore.

    Bonus 02: each relay is unique to the service so you can tell when a service either got hacked or sold your info.

    Side Note: there are setups similar to this for credit cards. I use Wise.com for online transactions with 3 different “virtual” cards that I can destroy if they get exposed.

    • PiJiNWiNg@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      3 days ago

      If you’re willing to pay for premium, Proton supports custom domains and catch-all addresses, so you can cut out all the extra mail relay stuff. Just give out vendor@mydomain.com, and it all comes back to the same mailbox. If it gets compromised, just set up a rule to trash anything to that address.

      • slowbyrne@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Even better is that simplelogin was purchased by proton and it being incorporated into the product. Already mostly done from what I can tell. I started with Firefox Relay and if they even give me a reason to leave I’ll just switch over to what’s baked into proton. There is something to be said for keeping them separate though. If I ever leave proton, having kept the relay service separate would be a big time saver.

    • sunbytes@lemmy.world
      16·
      4 days ago

      Thing is, any friends and family that click “accept” when an app asked for permission to see their address book will have accidentally released the “good” email.

      I wonder whether there shouldn’t just be “an email I can read out to people on the phone” and the rest are all random privacy/hash ones.

  • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.worldEnglish
    40·
    5 days ago

    Marked as Spam, I’ll never see it again, and if enough people do they’ll get the entire email service blocked by your email provider since they’re actively hosting spam. And there’s not much more annoying and difficult than trying to remove a legitimate service from spam lists because some users abused it.