Decentralizing online accounts

Email addresses, while starting off as an online inbox to receive messages, are nowadays inseparable from our online identity. Every day, we generate massive amounts of data through services we signed up to over the years － by making queries, uploading posts, making purchases, and a plethora of various online activities － and leave a unique digital trail. These activities paint a very detailed picture of our lives and who we are, making them extremely valuable; hackers, corporations, and governments all alike are attempting to trace and catalogue them.

Practicing better habits to protect sensitive data like email addresses can help drastically enhance our privacy and anonymity online. One effective method is to decentralize your online accounts using a combination of permanent and temporary email addresses.

Permanent addresses

Permanent addresses are the ones you intend to use for the foreseeable future. These addresses will be used for sending and receiving emails and any other active email correspondence.

There are countless email service providers out there, but for our purpose, we are interested in the ones with enhanced privacy. For the extra careful, each account should be signed up on the tor network with a request for a new identity (obtain a different IP address).

Temporary addresses

Using a single, non-privacy respecting email address to sign up for everything from Uber to Reddit to government services is a terrible idea. Even worse if using the same password across these accounts, and especially so if shared with the primary email for correspondence also. To prevent this issue, it is highly recommended to set up aliases and temporary addresses along with the use of password managers.

Email aliases

Emails sent to an alias are instantly forwarded to your inbox. Aliasing is superior to email subaddressing (the plus (+) trick) for a few reasons.

  1. One cannot reply from a subaddress.
  2. Using subaddresses are not allowed on some websites.
  3. Subaddress doesn't conceal the real address.

It is strongly recommended to set up aliases for your permanent addresses when you wish to conceal your permanent address, but don't necessarily want to burn the associated temporary address after single use.

Burner addresses

Burner addresses, as the name suggests, are for one-time (or otherwise limited) use. You can use these when you have no plans of correspondence, like redeeming some kind of sweepstake.

Miscellaneous

spamgourmet can be used as a burner-relayer hybrid, where you can create arbitrary burner addresses which all forward to a specified permanent address.

*closed source **with outbox feature