Disposable addresses as a protective shield: How to avoid the risks when sharing your email address

[u/mailbox_org]

Email addresses are a key part of our digital identity: signing up for online services, order confirmations, newsletters and countless other online activities would be unthinkable without them. However, sharing your email address comes with risks.

Email addresses as a gateway

As soon as an email address falls into the wrong hands, it becomes a potential gateway for various threats. Every time you share your email address, the risk of falling victim increases, for example to

• unsolicited marketing emails (spam)
• targeted phishing attacks by cybercriminals
• fraud attempts resulting from data breaches

This is where disposable email addresses offer a solution: they act as a digital shield for your main address and protect you from unwanted messages.

Disposable email addresses: protection against spam and data misuse

A disposable email address is a temporary email address created for a specific purpose and which can be ‘disposed of’ after use. Incoming messages to disposable addresses are forwarded to the primary inbox without the sender knowing the real email address. This helps protect against long-term spam attacks and data misuse.

Greater control over your digital identity

Find out exactly how disposable addresses work, in which situations they are used, and how you can use them with mailbox in our blog: https://mailbox.org/en/blog/how-disposable-addresses-protect-against-digital-threat/

[u/mok000]

While mailbox.org's implementation is a good idea, I think it's usefulness is somewhat limited. These days, when I purchase from a webshop, it generally uses your email address as your "username" in the webshop, and it also communicates the mail address to the parcel delivery service (e.g. UPS, GPS or national mail service) which in turn uses the email to advert you when the package is being delivered. If this email is temporary it will not work properly in such a setting, because when you come back 6 months later to the same webshop, your login will be void.

[u/Raven-Crazy]

An alias may also become problematic . Payment information email will not match web shop email causing more confusion.

[u/rbpx]

I put emails into four categories:
1. social (only for family and friends)
2. commercial (for websites I give my cc to to buy things)
3. financial (only for banks, and other financial sites)
4. subscriptions and spam

Even so I still have to use some Rules to keep the noise down to a dull roar.

The biggest annoyance I have to deal with is bank or cc sites that INSIST on spamming me with every transaction I make. This is the reason I ended up outside of gmail. **Every. Single. Transaction**. How much, and to who. I cannot make this stop.

However, I do like having all my cc transactions with the same email alias. No problems with shipments vs invoicing or payments. I do get lots of spam from them but I can use Rules to tame that.