Anyone wanna share their email strategy? I'm thinking of going for the following but I'm still undecided:
1. 1 custom domain (<simple-word-or-two>.com): this will be used for friends, family and any online accounts that know me IRL.
Use Fastmail masked addresses with my custom domain where it makes sense like an online account for amazon.
2. 1 custom domain (<online-nickname>.xyz): this will be used for a blog, professional IRL interviews, correspondence, github.
Use Fastmail masked addresses with my custom domain where it makes sense.
3. Masked emails using fastmail.com: for online accounts that are ephemeral, random newsletter signups etc. Don't want to associate any of my custom domains or IRL identity. Don't care if these are portable.
My main goals are:
- Separate my online identity/alias used for my blog (2) from gov entities, banks etc (1).
- for more anonymity/privacy use the fastmail.com domain with masked addresses to blend in with others on this domain.
I'd love feedback and to read what you do if you want to share :)
Your strategy seems good to me. The primary reference that I use for this kind of stuff is Michael Bazzell's book "Extreme Privacy". It goes into some detail about his strategy for using custom domains to compartmentalize things. That's what I base my own strategy on.
The only thing that I would add is that I prefer to "salt" my single-purpose email addresses with a bunch of random characters to prevent enumeration attacks, since it would be trivial to figure out the email address that I use for different services by just guessing. If I used amazon@domain.net, I might also use uber@domain.net, etc. Adding a salt prevents this from happening.
> 1 custom domain (<online-nickname>.xyz)
I got banned by .xyz once. I did manage to get it cleared up, but being banned by the TLD itself is pretty unpleasant. It's hard to even figure out that's what happened. And then I had to "prove" I was no longer distributing malware, with a list of what things I'd done to clean up the site and prevent further malware distribution - which was difficult as I was never distributing malware to begin with. Just a static website for a wordle variant, no ads or other 3rd party content.
I just use a Fastmail address for my resume and such. I dont want to use my personal domain because while not offensive it sounds a bit silly.