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.
If you’re reading this but haven’t yet signed up, join the growing Secrets of Privacy community for free and get our newsletter delivered to your inbox by subscribing here 👇
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
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Secrets of Privacy to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.