Never give out your email. Just hand out proxy addresses. Have a couple in your wallet\phone casing for when you need to give one right away without time to generate it.
No spam. Or if you get some, one click to stop receiving mail from a specific proxy.
Takes some using to, and some work each time you give out an email address. But so does sifting through a ton of spam, because you didn't care enough to only give out a proxy address.
The worst abusers are the ones that mix vital emails with marketing and fluff. In the US you have to deal with the Social Security Administration your entire adult life. You need to deal with them while paying into the program during the working years and also while cashing out in retirement. So you can't just ignore communications with them, but yet most emails are fluff like holiday greetings, reminders not to be scammed (which are repeats of the same advice they gave in all previous emails).
Banks also do this, but they at least use the same subject lines that I can auto-filter.
I'm in the UK. I have several bank accounts, both personally and for business.
For my four personal accounts my last email was last October, and the one before that was last July.
For my business accounts I have most set to email me a statement every month (automations attached).
I wonder if there is some sort of regulation specific to the UK that stops them.
Edit: egg on my face. The article’s author suggested the same service. Heh. Anyways…
I highly recommend a service like SimpleLogin. It allows for dynamic wildcards:
- store1@my.domain - whatever@my.domain - @my.domain
All gets fwd to my real email and I can kill any address from my email client by unsubscribing (or login to the SimpleLogin interface)
You can go further and use subdomains or pattern matching to send things to different addresses like your spouse and friends. e.g.
- @friend.my.domain -> friend@gmail.com - *@spouse.my.domain -> babe@example.com
Not affiliated, just really happy with the service
I do this. But I hit a wall with shopify. They only allow 5 email addresses to be bound to an account and only one account to one phone number. So now I cannot get tracking information from about a dozen online stores that at some point or another switched to shopify after I already made a custom email for them
I've been using Proton Mail and iOS (through iCloud+) for this. Almost every purchase online goes through a proxy, and once the item is delivered, the email deleted.
This has a side benefit of being able to sign up to the popup modals for like, 10-20% off a first purchase.
Some sites do not parse the emails correctly though (if they contain periods, etc) and it's also hard to order track.
I find it's worth the trouble to have a relatively quiet inbox.
I use a wildcard proxy. Like msg-BUSINESS@example.com. Each business gets it's own alias. I can just generate them at the point of sale without any prior configuration.
If a particular business annoys me it's quite easy to start managing their emails separately.
Incredibly useful for when a company gets acquired and their old transactional email database is turned into a marketing database.