How do *you* use email 'aliases' productively . . .?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This week, I just learned about email aliases, where, apparently, your host service can allow you to sign up for more than one email address and link it to your main account . . . For example:

Main Account: Tripler@xyzmail.org
Aliases: Tripler.sdmb@xyzmail.org, sdmb.tripler@xyzmail.org, Awesome.tripler@xyzmail.org, mildy.nifty.tripler@xyzmail.org, etc. etc.
Obviously, these aren’t in use to protect the innocent. . . ETA: I’m not sure how to break the autoformatted links, so click on those at your own risk.

I get the feeling that the initial setup could be somewhat exhausting. On the other hand, having filters for addresses auch as “Tripler.bills@xyzmail.org” (for utilities, credit cards, etc), could be useful for declutterinng an inbox.

I’m just starting out on this whole discovery, and after nigh on 30 years of having a small handful of email addresses, am feeleing a bit behind the times. Do you use aliases? How so, and how well does it work for you?

Tripler
Apparently I’m a dinosaur in a Warp-Drive world.

2

I use it for another person’s email. My husband is completely tech-phobic, can’t even handle his little flip phone without bringing it to me if he gets a text. (This is partly language-driven, since he is Japanese and finds it a lot of work to read English. I can sympathize, it’s a lot of work for me to read Japanese.) Anyway, he does not have an email account of his own. So I set him up with an alias on my email account so that his relatives, bank and medical providers can have a place to send him email and information. There arel also entities that require one to use email for the login, and only allow one account per email, so it helps with those situations as well.

3

I don’t use aliases, just two separate email accounts; one primarily for social media – including the Dope – and one for everything else. Comcast/Xfinity used to forward social media mail to my main address, now everything just goes into Microsoft Mail.

4

I use one email account for people I know, one for my business correspondences, and a couple others for everyone else (“burner” emails). The burner emails tend to get filled with spam and scams, so I just replace them with others when they do. This keeps my friends, family, and business emails pristine.

5

I have a gmail account that is specifically for the SDMB. I have some aliases set up on this account that I use for test accounts here. BannyMcBanface for example is used to train new moderators on how to things like issue warnings and suspend/ban accounts (he has been banned quite a few times just because of his name).

Everything else is separate accounts.

6

I use an alias account for friends and family.

My main account is used for signing up to this or that (like the SDMB) and, since they tend to sell that info, collects all the spam. My alias account is friends and family. They all go to one inbox but I setup a rule that anything to Whack-a-Mole@123.com goes in one folder and anything to WaMFamily@123.com goes into a different folder.

I am careful to only use the family one with family/friends.

ETA: The above emails are fake. Maybe they go somewhere but not to me.

7

Just for my nefarious criminal activity.
Well until I was put into the WPP.

Oops. Gotta a make an emergency call.

:laughing:

8

My job includes testing online registration systems, so I use them literally everyday at work.

9

I have about 20 aliases that I use for various purposes. Filtering emails for different purposes is one of them. For example, I sell several software applications, and have a dedicated email address for support for each of them (app1@mydomain.com, app2@mydomain.com, etc). This doesn’t really help me much, but I think it looks more professional than having support email go to a personal address like mark@mydomain.com.

To be honest, filtering different accounts based on the recipient email isn’t really that helpful to me. I can easily filter based on the sender or subject and that’s more useful than filtering based on the recipient.

I also use them for registering multiple accounts at various providers. For example, I have two PayPal accounts, a personal account using one email address and a business account using a different address. This is probably the purpose that is most helpful to me.

10

Both of these ideas match my experience and are how I approach my own email management.

The real problem IMO is that any/everyone you give a customized email address to is free to use that address how they want, not how you want. Want your bank to send all your account statements and alerts to one of your addresses and all their “exciting new offers” to another of your addresses? Nice idea, but they will not cooperate.

Pretty quickly whatever neat separation of purposes you’d started with will become muddied by outliers. And that’s before we consider the malfeasors out there who you think are legit reputable retailers until they sell their entire customer list to somebody who turns out to be an evil spammer at heart. Or until their customer list gets hacked & sold. And resold. And resold … and always to ever less reputable outfits.

11

You can use the backtick character (`) to display links, addresses, or code in a way that is not interpreted as a link https://boards.straightdope.com, for example. Just use backticks like quotes:

`https://boards.straightdope.com`

It can be stupid hard to type the backtick character from some mobile keyboards.

I use email aliases, but I control my own domain so it isn’t just a prefix or suffix to my regular address. Functionally not much difference, though.

Everything gets its own alias:
bank@example.com
cableco@example.com
broker@example.com
doctor@example.com

I currently have hundreds of aliases. They are handy two main reasons:

  1. This is the one I use as an explanation when I have to verbally tell a clerk at the bank my email is bank@example.com. It puts a big barrier in the way of phishing attempts. If I get an email “from my bank” at myname@example.com I know it is fake. It is a real purpose, but is really secondary to
  2. When the company either gets hacked or just gets spammy, I can cancel the address. I have many addresses that are now bank2@example.com, because the bank leaked addresses, and they became spam collectors. Other companies just don’t understand what “unsubscribe” and “opt-out” mean, so then I can tell my mail server that spamcom@example.com doesn’t exist, and it will refuse to accept the email.
12

I’ve often used Google’s automatic aliases to sign up for things. The idea is to keep track if I start getting a bunch of junk. However, it uses the + sign which some places won’t accept, and it’s pretty trivial to just remove everything after it to get my regular email address. Still it has worked well enough that my account never gets swarmed with junk.

Still, the flaws mean that I would welcome some aliases that were more opaque.

13

If you have a gmail account, you can create tons of email addresses based on that original email account. If you are gooniesforlife123@gmail.com you have these and more options:

goonies.for.life.123@gmail.com
gooniesforlife1.2.3@gmail.com

Well, you get the point.

14

Personal address — friends, family, personal correspondence, bank accounts, and medical accounts. It’s my main address and uses my military handle so it has an informal name like bullitt@xyz.net. It’s been unchanged for decades.

Business address — a more professional looking address like jsmith@xyz.net format, for work and LinkedIn, on my resumé, etc. It’s been unchanged for decades.

General address, like bullitt.usmc@xyz.net — for purchases, Safeway club and other stores, online forum accounts, etc.

I check these three daily. The general address needs regular grooming, to unsubscribe from spam auto-subscribes. The other two addresses stay pretty clean.

Then I have some alias addresses for other uncommon uses.

A calendar address, like bullitt.log@xyz.net format — for my calendar. All my invites go there. If someone sends an invite to bullitt@xyz.net, I have to manually type it in to my bullitt.log@xyz.net calendar. It’s a bit of a PITA, but it’s working so far.

A notes address, like bullitt.notes@xyz.net format — tied to the notes on my phone. I can search my phone notes or that account for any notes I’ve created.

A maps address, like bullitt.maps@xyz.net format — tied to the main map that I use. I mark my map with points of interest. To date I have thousands of places marked, for places I want to go. If I need a clean map, I change accounts.

There may be a more efficient way to do all of this, but so far this system has been working alright. I’ll watch this thread for good ideas.

15

Here’s my map tied to one email address. It’s pretty crowded.

[Album] My map so far. Interesting places I want to visit!
16

Me too, for exactly the same reasons.

I often need to do the same, I have a specific domain that all aliases go into the mailinator.com black hole.

Edit: on the off chance you test applications locally - running on your machine - I cannot recommend highly enough PaperCut (Windows only, I have not recently needed a Mac version. Hmm. Maybe a worthy side project)

17

The main thing I use aliases for is managing email lists–I have email addresses where most or all of the incoming email needs to be copied to several people, and the people on those lists change periodically. With an alias, I can set it up to automatically forward the email to everyone who needs to get it without making their addresses public, and I can change the lists whenever people join or leave the groups.

For example: I manage technical issues for a club that I’m in, but there are several other people who also handle parts of the work. I’ve created an address specifically for technical requests, and anything that comes to that address gets forwarded to all the other volunteers as well as to my private address. Whoever can deal with it first fields the task.

18

I use separate aliases for each online service that has any significant amount of my personal information; if I get to hear about one of those online services getting breached in a way that exposes my information, I set up a new alias for that service (assuming the breach doesn’t make me want to leave them), and I redirect the old alias to a ‘quarantine’ account.

Case in point, I used to have an email alias ebaycontact@[my domain] which I used for login and communication with eBay. In 2014, ebay suffered a serious data breach in which intruders made off with the personal data for millions of customer accounts. I set up a new alias for ebay and changed it on my ebay account, then I redirected the old ebaycontact to quarantine.

I look into the quarantine mailbox once in a while to see what’s happening there. Just recently, I received a more-convincing-than-usual phishing email purporting to be from a UK bank, and addressing me by my full name and using my real postcode as a supposed security assurance - the spammer was able to do this because of the breached data from eBay (I could tell because despite purporting to be from a bank, it was addressed to the defunct ebaycontact address).

This approach allows me to ‘retire’ an alias if it gets breached, or starts getting too much spam, or whatever, and only one thing needs changing on the accompanying online account where I use that email.

19

My “free appetizer” example below reminds me of another use I have for email aliases. It is risk free for me to take advantage of any “give use your email for 10% off” or other offers. Even if the company doesn’t understand the meaning of “unsubscribe” (most think unsubscribe lasts for 6 months), I can always just ban the alias, and never have to hear from them again. My list of banned addresses also makes a convenient way to record companies I’m not interested in doing business with.

This inspired me to a do a quick count. I have 14 addresses where I’ve had to retire the old one and start a new one for that company, so company2@example.com. Ebay is one of them. Interestingly, I don’t have any addresses that have gotten to 3. That doesn’t count companies where there was a data leak, so I just banned the address, because I didn’t care about future contact. I have 140 addresses banned for either leaks, or because the company itself was spammy.

I have 694 named aliases, plus one catchall domain, where I don’t have to specifically create an alias, I can just use anything. I don’t like using the catchall if I can avoid it, because someday spammers are going to start sending to random addresses @catchall.example.com, and then I’ll have to turn off the catchall, and specifically enable any aliases still in use there.

The catchall is convenient though, because it lets me create addresses when I’m out in the world without having to do anything in advance (“free appetizer if you sign up for our email list!”). Creating a named alias I need command line access to my mail server, which I can do from my phone, but that is pretty annoying. At my computer it takes a few seconds to create a new alias.

20

Uffdah . . . After one hell of a busy week at work/home, I finally have a chance to respond.

I see your point. My main email has been in use for so long, on so many websites “in the wild” that I just can’t keep up with all of the incoming spam. I’m having a hell of a time clearing out my inbox, mentally filtering legitimate incoming from so . . . much . . . crap . . . that Outlook just seems to not give a rip.

So . . . How does one go about getting one’s own domain?

If I understand what you’re doing, and in perspective of @wguy123 's post, are you just using one account, with the ‘dot-alias’ thing for different websites and apps?

So here’s a question:

I noticed that Outlook lets me sign up for other “alias” accounts tied to the original. So, with Tripler@xyzmail.org, I can also use EODdoper@xyz.com, OnePointFourSDMB@xyz.com and BlastAndFrag@xyz.com, that all route incoming email to Tripler@xyz.com.

I also have recently signed up for a service that gives me random addresses for websites such as “randomsite.login12345@xyzforwarding.com” in a near infinite-stream of possible combinations (as in, I can click a button and it randomly generates it for me). I can see the utility in signing up for mailing lists, or less-than-above-board websites that I would use, but don’t need to leave personal data on, 'cause they’re epeatedly hacked (I’m looking at you GeoCaching). In the vernacular, are these also “aliases”?

Tripler
The only domain I currently control is this desk . . . when the cat lets me.