Totally agree with unique at own domain isn't actually privacy. It wouldn't take much of a paper trail to work out the details.
I continue to use it everywhere for a few reasons:
- if someone emails me acting all friendly like we've had some previous relationship but it's sent to linked@mydomain or github@mydomain I know they've just scraped my contact details and it's spam
- similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don't expect it's easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)
- I already use a password manager and have different passwords on every site, but having a different email address too raises the barrier further for someone trying to script an automated attack based off some other pwned data set.
> - similarly, if a vendor leaks or sells my data and I start receiving marketing from somewhere I don't expect it's easier to trace the source of the leak (and in some cases just blackhole that entire email address)
This is exactly why I do it, it's eye opening to see exactly which companies leaked your address. As a result of being able to blackhole the leaked addresses I no longer get any spam, the Dvorak dream.
I actually caught a company outright selling my address to AWS of all places, I didn't even know Amazon purchased mailing lists.
AWS were crafty because they didn't directly sell a service, they only offered "resources" for "business leaders" because they knew nothing about what I might need.
Explore the AWS [REDACTED] where business leaders can access eBooks, guides, and customer stories to find practical advice on building or improving upon a data strategy. Learn how you can leverage data as a strategic asset, make better decisions with insights from data, and innovate faster.
I find this very interesting in 2026.
I use my gmail address for everything and I don't really get spam (except from services I've subscribed to legitimately but haven't bothered to configure to not send promotional mail).
I never really get promotional mail from 3rd parties at all.
Is this just gmail filters being very good?
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I agree with all of this. I’d add that it’s useful for sorting and searching. Things like keyword matching, from address, and from domain aren’t as consistent as you’d hope, but companies do need to actually email the address they were given, so you can use it to reliably identify emails from them.
But all 3 of those use cases, plus privacy, can be addressed with word.salad@bigdomain.com. So you may as well get the privacy bit in there.
True, but it requires setting up a mailbox at bigdomain.com for every use case. With your own domain you can just setup a catchall mainbox like catchemall@yourdomain.com and don’t even need to remember any mailbox@bigdomain.com name. Just use github@ and it will be automatically be catched by your catchall.
So any mail to anyrandomstring@yourdomain.com is actually received? Sounds like something that works great when only you do it, but might quickly be abused if it catches on?