>you can target them on Quora, Reddit etc as well.
This is one of the reasons I stopped giving out my primary email address for user signups. I use a service called Blur which allows for unlimited "masked" emails to be created, allowing me to give companies read-only email addresses. In the four years I've had it I have created 378 email addresses. If I'm including the email addresses that I've already deleted, the list gets to 400.
Marketing and the 3000 spam messages I get per month made me do this. It does not have to be this way, but as long as corporations can play fast and loose with my email address I will make sure they never get a real one to begin with.
Edit: Want to add here that I am not in any way sponsored by that company, I've just been using them for years now and think their prices are reasonable.
I registered a domain name that’s basically just a UUID, and pointed it’s MX records to my self-hosted email server (you could also point it to Google Apps or Fastmail).
Everything before the UUID domain is just the name of the service, so something like hackernews@e913ff00...xyz. If someone sells out my email address, I can instantly burn it by just adding a sieve rule since they’re all unique. I even know who sold it based on what name I picked before the @ symbol. This has been working out pretty well for me so far.
I'm using a similar technique, but rather generating a random address @my-domain.
To know which provider it was (in case I later get spam from somewhere else), I keep a text-file + email myself any time a new forwarder is set up, so this way I can always look up which service it was.
This way, I was able to spot a leak at box.com and maybe a couple of other places, before it was even announced.
For websites that have questionable password policy, I use passwords that curse the company in my native language (if no-one sees it then it's fine, but if someone does then they have deserved it). I bet the same tactic would work if you get creative, ie spotfuckingify@uuid
If you're using gmail, plus-suffixing is a low-effort but effective countermeasure: username+servicename@gmail.com gets delivered to username@gmail.com.
Ah. You can set up dash-suffixing if you're using a custom domain with gmail. Create a new "catch-all" email account. Log into that new catch-all account, and create forwarding rules for alice-* to go to alice@example.com, bob-* to go to bob@example.com, ...
Once the marketers discover people are doing this, they'll ban email addresses from this service as if they were fraudulent. Wouldn't be surprised if companies started disallowing everything except gmail.
I run https://kopi.cloud - let's you give out burner addresses you can just make up on the fly. SSO through Google, Facebook, Twitter. One touch blocking of burner addresses. Supports replying and attachments. Mail 2 RSS - read Facebook / StackOverflow, newsletters, etc. as RSS feeds. And you can use your own domain if you want, so no lock-in.
This is one of the reasons I stopped giving out my primary email address for user signups. I use a service called Blur which allows for unlimited "masked" emails to be created, allowing me to give companies read-only email addresses. In the four years I've had it I have created 378 email addresses. If I'm including the email addresses that I've already deleted, the list gets to 400.
Marketing and the 3000 spam messages I get per month made me do this. It does not have to be this way, but as long as corporations can play fast and loose with my email address I will make sure they never get a real one to begin with.
Edit: Want to add here that I am not in any way sponsored by that company, I've just been using them for years now and think their prices are reasonable.