So i’ve set up a custom domain to use with protonmail and was curious if anyone else uses the catch all in this manner.
I was thinking that when a new account is created on $website I would use a custom email address that would then be caught by the ‘catch-all’. So say the domain is catata.fish, and the website is target.com, then when signing up I would use target@catata.fish. Previously when using gmail I would use email+target@gmail.com.
Does anyone see any issues doing it this way? Thanks!
This is exactly how I use it. Basically, if you receive spam on webshop@catata.fish you know exactly who sold/“lost” your address.
One downside is that you cannot send from this address, but you usually don’t need that anyway. And in the rare case that you do, you can just create an actual alias.
Ah that is a good thing to keep in mind. Proton allows 15 email addresses on the account I have so I could always create one and delete it later.
SimpleLogin too. Create aliases even more… aliased (aliaser?) .
I use them for extra control with some things. Example: I may have 5 main proton aliases each for a different thing like shopping or banking etc. Then sign up for Zillow House hunting emails with a SimpleLogin alias which forwards to one of the proton emails. When I’m done house hunting, I turn it off and they never had my regular one to lose in a hack or restart marketing and sell.
Too much work for me personally, to use one for every site but it’s great for any heavily email traffic like political donation emails or a site with heavy notification emails.
Assuming ProtonMail supports catch-all (I don’t use Proton), this is fine and a typical use of the catch-all. You may get weird looks when you give a business their name back as your email, and if anyone figures out that you have a catch-all they might just spam you regardless, at any email address they want, e.g. “icanfreelyspamyou@catata.fish”. I would add a string of numbers/letters at the end, like “target.akr8@catata.fish” so you can be sure when someone sells your email.
All said, it’s a little bit weak to any determined adversary. Any human who figures out your plan can easily start playing around with it - Target may sell your email as “thisguywantsspam@catata.fish” and you’ll never know who sold it.
Edit: Also, you’re trivial to track across different accounts if anyone figures out that you own the email domain.
Makes sense. I’m not too worried about privacy in that regard considering bad actors are going to do what they do. This was more for the automated systems, plus I don’t see how it would be any less privacy focused than just a standard email + aliases.
Don’t use + as delimiter. It is an email standard for alias and will send the email to the none alias version inbox. Better to use a different delimiter, like minus, -, instead. Not sure how easy it is to do with Proton.
I keep a whitelist of email addresses allowed, the rest is therefore blocked. This means I can’t send to random@example.com and get to the inbox.
huh, I never knew you could use delimiters other than +. That is a good thing to know.
I think I’ll just stick with using aliases with a delimiter.
You can’t. It is not an official alias. That is the point. So they will be seen as separate accounts. But I forward everything to he same account. Have to configure it for every email address. This way I keep a whitelist.
