Why You Want to Use Disposable Email Addresses (Part 1)
Disposable email addresses are a powerful way to immediately enhance your privacy
Welcome to another issue of Secrets of Privacy where we discuss personal privacy related topics and provide practical tips to 10X+your personal privacy.
This is the first in a two part series on temporary and disposable email addresses (a/k/a anonymous email). We’ll run through what they are and why you should incorporate them into your personal privacy stack.
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Having multiple email addresses is nothing new. Nearly everyone has a personal email plus a work address (notwithstanding that guy we all know that uses his work email for personal matters). Most of our readers probably probably have a few extra personal emails for some time to minimize clutter in their primary email account (we have over 10, but we’re a bit crazy, obviously).
For the most part, email tech hasn’t evolved all that much since the beginning. That was until recently.
But in just the past few years, new entrants like Proton have allowed you to create (and delete) unique email addresses from the same account and inbox (e.g. joe.smith@protonmail.com, orangebear@protonmail.com, etc.). So no more creating separate accounts with the same or different email providers. You can easily mange multiple, unique addresses from a single login and dashboard. This was a huge win for convenience and a meaningful win for privacy because it made it easier to create and manage multiple unique addresses.
Disposable and temporary email services have been around for a few years, but really took off in the last year or two. Having used Simplelogin for some time now, we honestly believe disposable email represents the biggest privacy innovation in quite some time. Maybe since the VPN became usable at scale. In fact, we believe disposable email addresses are arguably more important than unique passwords. More on that controversial take later.
Temporary email addresses are also a significant blow to Big Data and Big Tech because temporary emails make it almost impossible for them to build a consumer profile on you without a single, identifiable email address tied to a unique user. That’s a huge win if you’re concerned about data tracking and data aggregators.
This technology is still in the early adopter stage - mass adoption is a ways off, if ever. To be honest, we doubt most people will be ever be willing to put in the little extra effort to start use temporary and disposable emails. Which gives you a great opportunity to make yourself a harder target for Bad Actors.
Topic Contents
In this series, we’ll touch on the following topics:
Real life use cases for disposable email addresses
What is a disposable email address?
How do disposable email addresses work?
What are the advantages?
What are the disadvantages?
What problems do disposable email addresses solve?
Disposable email best practices
Why disposable email addresses are more important to privacy and security than unique passwords
Top disposable email address providers
Real Life Use Cases for Disposable Email Addresses
Before diving into the details of disposable email addresses, we wanted to set the table with two real life examples.
Trezor 2022 Email Breach
As some of you probably know, Trezor is a crypto currency hardware wallet manufacturer. In April 2022, Trezor owners started receiving emails notifying them of a security update:
Unfortunately these emails weren’t from Trezor. As it turned out, Trezor used Mailchimp to manage their email communications. And Mailchimp was compromised, likely in the form of a rogue employee who stole Trezor’s email list and provided it to a Bad Actor. The Bad Actor then started targeting Trezor owners via email with crypto scams.
The problem for Trezor users is their email is now compromised. And Bad Actors with that email list know the recipient has crypto currency assets. So they and other Bad Actors with the information can target the recipient for as long as the recipient maintains that email address. If you used a traditional primary or even secondary email address, it’s difficult to delete that email address because you’re probably using it for other services as well.
GiveSendGo Donation Campaign Breach
In early 2022, Canadian truckers organized a “freedom convoy” to protest COVID-19 restrictions. Supporters of the convoy created a fundraiser, first on GoFundMe, then on GiveSendGo. In February of that year, Bad Actors hacked the main convoy campaign on GiveSendGo and released data on donors. Information included email, IP address and name. Name could be faked, and IP can be misleading if a donor used a VPN. But email was more likely to be genuine because donors needed to provide a real email address to receive communications, set up an account and communicate with the campaign organizer.
The problem here is obvious – using a static email address like your primary or secondary email address forever compromises that email address. For those that use personal information in their email address (john.Doe@gmail.com or worse, john.doe.birthdate@gmail.com), it’s easy to take that and find out even more details on the recipient. In the case of this campaign, some donors lost their jobs and were harassed after their public information was leaked.
What is a Temporary/Disposable Email Address?
These terms are used interchangeably for the most part. Services like SimpleLogin have blurred the lines between temporary and disposable email addresses by making it incredibly easy to create and manage your own unique email addresses, whether for one time use or longer. Which is why for the most part, we use the single term “disposable”. But for the sake of completeness, here’s a quick overview of the two terms as well as Gmail-type aliases.
Disposable Email Addresses
We use “disposable” to mean an email address you’re likely to use more than once, but can delete at any time. For example, signing up for a blog newsletter or any service or signup that requires email verification. We have a few signups to our newsletter from disposable email domains, which we love to see! But you can always delete the email address once you no longer have a need for the service.
Temporary Email Addresses
A temporary email address would be a good fit for a single-use validity situation. In other words, when you only need to provide your email address once. For example, signing onto a public wifi network. To be honest though, you can usually use a completely made up email address (e.g. jane@doe.com) to gain access to these types of services or content. That’s usually our first choice.
Gmail-Type Aliases
Email “alias” can mean a few different things, but in the context of Gmail, it’s creating a variation of your primary email address by adding a “+” to your primary email. For example, in Gmail, it would look like this: joe.smith+newsletter@google.com. You’ll hear websites claim aliases like this are good for “privacy” or “security” but that’s bad advice. It’s obviously easy to determine the primary email account. All you have to do is remove the “+newsletter” portion, either yourself or with a simple script. These types of aliases are useful for filtering messages in your inbox, but they are not useful for privacy or security purposes.
How do Disposable Email Addresses Work?
A user will generate a unique address, typically randomly generated with a mix of numbers and letters. A sample address auto-generated with SimpleLogin is: facebook.kgnr50@simplelogin.com.
The primary use case is to receive email. However, certain provides will allow you to even send emails from that account, though it’s not as straightforward as sending a regular email. All emails to a disposable email address will go to your primary account (example: joe@protonmail.me). You can always delete the email at a later date or temporarily shut it off.
Part 1 Concluding Remarks
We’ll conclude the disposable email discussion next week. Specifically, we’ll explore the advantages and disadvantages of disposable email addresses, sample use cases, and best practices. We’ll even throw in a list of current providers and of course explain our controversial take that disposable email addresses are more important to privacy and security than unique passwords.
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