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Is this email compartmentalization idea bad? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So, let's say you created a ProtonMail account entirely on your Tor Browser through the Tor mirror the entire time and then also signed up to SimpleLogin/AnonAddy to have an e-mail alias/cloak for each account that you have (for example, say you have make an Reddit account and you go and create an alias for the Reddit account and that alias will be used ONLY for that account and nothing else)

Would it be a bad idea to make aliases and use them for stuff tied to your personal identity (such as banks or stuff you've previously used payment options tied to your name etc) or it wouldn't matter?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I do this pretty much everywhere, but mainly for 2 reasons:

If I close the account and never want to hear from them again, filter out the alias
If I receive junk mail to that address, I know where it was leaked from

I do this by a catch-all on my own personal domain, so [email protected] will get sent to my inbox. I generate random strings/words/names for every email.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I do this with Protonmail and my only word of warning is migrating this setup isn’t possible with many other services. I tried to migrate to o365 and the setup is silly. I gave up and still use proton.

[–] peregus 1 points 1 year ago

I do the same for the same reasons!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you make an alias for each account there should be no trivial way to correlate them together.
But I think there's a problem, making all the effort to go anonymous by signing up through Tor (and I assume using your email client always through Tor) would be kind of wasted because you gave a link all the information they need to tie everything back to you: the aliasing service which:

knows your real email address
may know that you are using Tor
knows the websites you signed up on
can know part, or all, of your actual personal information, which may very well be leaked in the email exchanges you make on the sensitive alias

So you need to trust your aliasing service not to snoop on your emails

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

One thing to note is that SimpleLgoin (haven't used AnonDady) is that it can generate different kinds of aliases.

One option allows you to specify the part of the email before the @. These will all use a common randomly generated sub domain. As these subdomains are assigned to individual users, you can correlate two aliases to the same user. It's probably not picked us as easily as an exact match, but far from impossible.

Simple login does have the option to generate completely random emails which don't use a common subdomain. This mixes your usage with every other user of the service.

[–] thecam 2 points 1 year ago

Aliases are always recommended over your main email address.

You can have a few email addresses (1 protonmail for personal stuff, 1 protonmail for anonymous/private accounts, etc) and then have a alias account for your personal email and an alias account for your anonymous/private email, etc. This way if the alias service you use gets comprimised, it will not link your personal accounts to your private/anonymous accounts.