Here's another advantage of email aliases which might not be obvious: Let's say you give a unique email address to your bank. Much later on you receive email "from" that same bank saying you need to login and perform some important urgent task with your bank account. If that email was *not* sent to the unique address you gave to that bank, then it's extremely suspicious! Beware of clicking on any links in it!
I am currently going down the rabbit hole that is trying to take control of my digital privacy and your videos make the process way less overwhelming. Thank You!
You have a lot to do, they are tracking us from every single angle, and it goes deep, even into system hardware. you really gotta dig deep to shut it all off/ and or mitigate as much as possible.
I love this channel, every time I think of some aspect of my online privacy I'd like to improve Naomi has either already made a video or seemingly a few days or weeks later releases a video. Absolutely fantastic.
in the 90s i started with over 60 different email addresses for this reason. it soon grew into the triple digits. back then, no one really understood why i had so many addresses. today, it is far easier to create these forwarders to do the same thing. however, back then it was less invasive than it is now.
Long ago in a millennia far far away, I setup a couple different emails for this purpose. I only give my real address out to people I know and have worked very hard at keeping it clean. But recently the spammers have found a way in…. So I’ve been wanting to move to Proton for all the reasons you can surmise. This may be the push I needed. Thank you Naomi for looking out for us and another great video.
Doesn't matter how careful you are, if your close people put your real address into their e-mail address book, and then their e-mail gets hacked, it's over. This creates such a large attack surface, it's so annoying. I feel the same way about all the people I give my phone number to. There should be low-cost services for numbers, too.
There are literally COUNTLESS ways for your email address to get "out there", and once it does, it won't matter whether it's proton email or not, you'll still start getting spam to that address.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of the facts presented here, but as someone who set up a personal domain and used a catchall email with various filtering strategies for over 10 years, my opinion is that, while it was functional, it was not worth it overall. I gave basically every external service a unique email (using various methods, including the "+" method described here). Over the years I needed to turn several dozen of them into actual email accounts so that I could send mail from them, which was a huge pain. I kept close track of all these, and set up all of the forwarding and "send-as" functionality, but it was always an uphill battle. In all of those years, I can count the number of times I received email to a service-specific address from an unrelated party on 2 or 3 hands. Of course, I was also very diligent with where I give out my emails. In the end, because my host was and is Gmail, the spam filtering is so good that all of the work and fuss was effectively for nothing. When Google unceremoniously booted all of its grandfathered-in customers from its once-free Google Apps domain service, I bailed and went back to using a single Gmail address and haven't looked back. And let me tell you, going out to all of the third-party services I'd given unique addresses to (multiple hundreds) and getting them all changed was a waking nightmare that took months. Am I more vulnerable now to data brokers and targeted ads? Debatable, since all of my emails were at my domain anyway, so I certainly never _felt_ more secure. Maybe it's easier to tie all of my activity to a single email address now, but if a career IT professional and hyper detail-oriented person can barely handle the effort and complexity of supporting their own multi-address ecosystem, I could never expect the average email user to maintain such a thing. And it only gets more complex and out of hand over time. In the modern world any kind of theoretically-ideal privacy is a fairy tale. Maybe you could avoid some of the pitfalls I described with an email alias service, but you'll never stop battling compatibility and workflow hindrances. The modern digital/commercial landscape is systemically incompatible with this ideology. IMO you're better off protecting yourself against the _actual_ threats by being generally informed on cyber security, using secure and unique passwords, with multi-factor authentication, and using the available financial monitoring tools and spam protection, than you are trying to stop the infinite waves of _potential_ threats represented by data brokering and security breaches.
I created about 7 emails a few weeks ago for privacy and it feels like such a hassle. Glad to find this video before I got too deep into multiple inboxes, this is so much more convenient and better too
i could be wrong from the little research i did (and i'm new to this as well but) just bought my own domains and it depends on the name literally lol something popular or in demand will cost easily into the 100s but if you've got a unique name or special brand name and it's likely not taken/sought after then maybe anywhere from 10-30 bucks @@terenarosa4790
Recently recommended your channel to a business woman I met. I might not implement many of these tips but knowing that they exist and keeping those options available is incredibly important. There are people in places with almost no protections and their having access to data safety is a way we can help support important freedoms across the entire planet not just our own backyards. That's worth doing imo.
I have like 5 emails the biggest problem is wanting to migrate most of them to different services. I separate them based on age, the older the email, the less important accounts I have it tied too. I've been considering protonmail for a long time, but haven't taken the plunge. I want to make my email more secure, and more private, but I'm also amazing at procrastinating
Does Proton mail not smell like a honey pot? Not your server not your data. Words are cheap and lies are easy. I'll suggest to consider running your own email server. purchase a static IP or DDNS service, have backups. Try the synology NAS drives astounding value and all solutions rolled into one that just works. well once you set it up. a considerable learning curve. Question is how much do you value your life being private? Only vulnerabilities that i see are that Synology possibly have backdoors coded in (not open source) and even if you install a opensource email server the "Intel Management Engine" operating system BIOS chip needed to run intel CPUs is a hardware level back door. (AMD has an equivalent)... I wonder if we could just cut the IC leg that connects to the ethernet? Anyways what it will at least achieve is making you invisible to data brokers and 95% of the internet. The members of the domination class that have access to the hardware backdoors, at least this far in don't seem to be interested in the average person or even criminals for that matter.
@@insightss9454 It's always a trade-off. Proton is private and secure enough for most people. Who cares if it's a letter-agency-honeypot? As long as you're not a criminal or an activist, all you care about is that your data is not being sold and shared and tracked over multiple services like google and amazon and microsoft tend to do. Hosting your own server takes exponentially more work to do than paying a few bucks for a proton account. And even then, your ISP could still have logs on all your mails. The reality is that email is not even that secure of a protocol anyway. Simply don't use emails for sensitive stuff that could compromise you, and you're good. A service like Proton is good enough for the the kind of stuff that you should be using an email for, simple as that.
In order to protect your original account is to create another account, however to protect the second account you need to create another account. This is what internet is about these days. Thank you for informing people.
This is incredibly timed! I'm working thru this very issue right now! I'm a Proton user and to find that SimpleLogin is part of them is awesome! I will be looking into this this evening! Thank you for the work you do here! It's outstanding!
Nope, ProtonMail is not a privacy alternative. It is found to be an FBI honeypot. This software is used to track criminals and arrest them. Mental Outlaw covered this topic
SimpleLogin can remove your account with no warning, just if their algorithms find your use as inconsistent with their policies. "With no warning" sounds for me too risky to trust them in 100%. SL is good to use the free account and use the aliases for less important websites. But I would not build all my mail-system on this service. Especially if you pay for the premium account, "with no warning" is in my opinion somethin really not fair. So it is better to have few separate but real email adresses (like gmail) and a free SL account for less important things. Even if Google deletes your account for some reason, it will only delete one account. But if you build a system of several dozen logins to various websites on SL, losing your SL account would be extremely painful.
Apple has built these functions into their Mail app, easy to create an alias account and turn them off when you want to, since it is part of their OS there is no additional payment for the service.
So bizarre that you and AllThingsSecured uploaded essentially the same video within 2 hours of each other. You both rock, keep it up! Thank you for the amazing content!
This was a really well done video, you surprised me by providing additional information besides the Gmail alias that everybody talks about. A lot of those downsides you mentioned regarding the Gmail aliases are ones I thought of, and are the reasons I hadn't used it in the past.
I don't know how I guessed this back then, but in 2005 I created 2 gmail accounts, (yes, when you still needed an invitation), i used one for spam and logins and the other one personal. Today, my personal account is free of spam and "the spam/login" one only receives 2 o 3 spam a week. Anyway, today I use proton mail and simplelogin. And I love your hair...
Thank You for the information. I had a Proton Account and never used it as it was difficult to swap but now watching couple of your videos I will try this again. Thank you.
Have been using unique addresses at one of my domains for maybe 20 years now & while it does take maybe an extra 5 minutes to stop & create a new aluas, it is SOOOO worth it. I get almost no spam & what I do get is immediately recognized & forwarded back to the sender's domain host as well as to any relevant companies. Good job on the video! I'm keeping the link to share when people ask me why I'm doing g this. And FYI get rid of your AOL account - it's the most insecure email client there is!
if you use a catch all you don't need an alias set up unless you want to send from that address. It doesn't take any time at all and I can make them up on the fly
I can relate to this, as I have a unique name shared by a few others in the US. Years ago I used my full name for an email address; where eventually, I had to abandon it due to dozens of weekly emails that were targeted for my namesake in another state. But, it is interesting to see the pattern of the regional entities attempting to contact my namesake in a particular state: Politicians, realtors, fundraising outfits, charitable causes, auto dealerships, construction companies . . . the list was endless. None of the emails were personal, but had the looks of being auto-generated. I was fortunate that email address was only given out to a few friends prior to abandoning it, as it was easy to update those friends with my new email address.
Years ago I used to do the unique address per site thing when I ran my own email server. (16 years ago now) and even then I could see who was the culprit of the spammers. Since I no longer run my own email service I haven't done that. I know I have two address (one on two different providers) that were suddenly hit with thousands of spam within the same month due to being put on lists. I figured it was a data breach somewhere.
THIS. I tell everyone they should use multiple aliases and give them out accordingly. The best email filter is the one that happens irl when you make a conscious choice about which one you give out. I have garbage, promotion, profesional and banking
This channel is beautifully and thoughtfully edited with compelling and visually interesting graphics. SO much work goes into each video. And the content is well-written and delivered - and really helpful. Thanks, NBTV!
Great video, Naomi! 🙂I have Proton Premium since a couple of days and I know that I can create 3 domains and 15 addresses, but the problem I have now is that I got a creative block on what mail domain to choose (I'm just a particular) lol
Thanks for helping everyone stay safe Naomi. 🙏 I try to siphon everything through a dozen different addresses but it does get to be a lot to manage. I had no idea about the sub-addresses. But I also don't use Google much.
I have a catchall Adress for about 12 years now and are loving it, but Proton was new to me. My catch all is forwarded to Gmail. And I can send Email for aliases from Gmail, but I need to set them up in Gmail. Proton was new for me though. Really helpful. Thanks.
I'm fed up with gmail. While they claim they aren't basing ads on email, I sure get a lot of targeted ads. Their analytics are also making me crazy. Thanks for this!
I am surprised that you didn’t mention the “hide my email” feature that has been part of iOS 15 and iCloud for a while. It auto-generates an unlimited number of surrogate email address for your iCloud email and provides the option for an autogenerated a 64-bit password. And with Apples expanded end-to-end encryption for most of your iCloud assets, it is a low cost service that makes sense for those in the iOS universe. If you activate the Advanced Data Protection feature, it becomes even more secure. The EFF applauded the move by Apple. The FBI was quoted in The Washington Post as generally saying it’s "deeply concerned with the threat end-to-end and user-only-access encryption pose." The move by Apple was brilliant because Apple itself can’t forcibly open encrypted data under this encryption scheme…which makes serving a federal subpoena to Apple essentially pointless.
thank you for this! can you direct me to articles/videos that will tech me more about this? Do you believe is can serve much of the capabilities of SimpleLog in? Can one set up different folders and also reply with alias email addresses? Thank you again.
I too am surprised this wasn't mentioned, but it leads me to believe that this video was sponsored by SimpleLogin. It looks like a great service, but as you stated, if you're already on iOS or MacOS, it is integrated and easy to use. @johnwilliam2474 yes you can set up different folders within the mail app to filter and keep track of the addresses.
but why when you could more easily create email addresses on the fly and make each unique. I have hundreds of email address that I receive emails at and when my info is sold, I know who the culprit is and can just click email to that address
I used to use spamgourmet but it recently stopped working for creating new addresses. Its creator died and his son is trying to maintain it. I don't know if it's working now, but it was great back in the day. Love the subtle humor in the graphics in this one 🙂
The plus sign, or concatenation, IS one of the actual rules for email. So is using the period as a separator. Not all ISPs support either. For instance, if the are periods in your address and someone doesn't type them, the email comes to you anyway. That's a violation, perhaps unique to Google.
You are just too clever... OK, I went on my IONOS account and created a catchall email (you just create a new email with * as the email name) and I forward those incoming emails to another monitoring account. Thanks for letting me know about a service I had but wasn't using!
I'm way lazier, just botting accounts for smaller email providers, then using a program I made to interact with them faster. They're tagged, grouped, etc to make their purpose clear. Didn't even bother to load images, they're only used for design and tracking after all, text and links are enough. And since it just interacts with the original email provider's api, they do the hard work of filtering the majority of spam. And nowadays emails are only really used for automated confirmation, 2fa, bills, etc emails. The exception being school/work/business, but that's usually a self hosted by the company on their domain. *Privacy is so much easier if you're a developer.*
Thanks for talking about 'SimpleLogin'! I already use burner e-mail addresses for reasons I can't state, and some services, like Traderie, block Gmail task-specific e-mail addresses by blocking the + delimiter those use. I could very well use that, because I bought a domain for a future website I'm currently working on, and have work e-mail set up on that, but also bought another domain that is a predicted common misspelling, and I could use that. 🤔
Have had my own domain with a catchall since 2001. Email companies were pretty unreliable at the time and as a consultant I'd get a new email every job change. Pure chaos. That drove me to get my own domain and I happily fell into this strategy by chance. i currently own about 15 domains one of which is just for job hunting since that's such a spam heavy activity.
From my personal experience, I would suggest that having a catch-all email system is not worth the hassle. As well as the additional addresses that you create for your own benefit, you may have to deal with others making up accounts for their own benefit. Many years ago I had such a system; my real email address had evidently been sold on and sold on and I was getting a great deal of spam. I started to notice that senders began adding random numbers and letters to my existing address, which presumably were also sold on so that folk believed them to be authentic, which perpetuated this cycle exponentially. Anyway, to cut to the chase, at its worst (after 12 years - yes I 'should' have ditched it), I was receiving over 16,000 (yes, sixteen thousand), spam emails a day! (I have photo evidence of it @ 14,000) - mostly to accounts that were not my intended address. Whilst I could prevent receiving specific addresses, I could not block senders whose addresses were never the same twice. It was a right rigmarole but thankfully spam filters improved. Eventually, the email company was taken over and eventually it shut down.
I too was also a Contractor for many years in the communications industry. I literally got to install the very first real time Packet Sniffing Server on the West Coast of Canada Friday the 8th 2001. At that time the Co that i worked for handled about 99% of the Data on and off Vancouver Island British Columbia Canada. The Black box was mandated to be installed in every head end in Canada that sold the internet or lose the ability to sell the internet. Mandated by the CRTC just before 911. Funny part of that story i helped install that Black box Friday and then Tuesday this group of people flew planes into building and life changed for everyone almost instantly. Pretty funny story when only a couple of us new that 1/2 mill box was sitting in our head end. The going joke back then when someone was standing next to it.. We would mutter.. That's one hell of a Black Box. As of late we have been told that the federal police in Canada's Communications network is now compromised by overseas Countries, last week we were told that all Video surveillance security devices in North America also compromised. My bet is not one chip shipped in the last 50 years would not pass the new inspection process. Pretty funny story Bro.
My issue with trying to protect myself at this point is that I have so many years of stuff I've put online, email addresses given out, I don't even know where to start! I even find it hard to use a darn VPN cause it causes issues logging into places and stuff... I wish it were all simpler.
Hello, what i have started doing is deleting old accounts that you dont use anymore and changing some thing around in those accounts before hand. Birthdays real names, etc. Once there gone, its one less thing to worry about. Some you cant delete like starbucks rewards. But those can be put into a new email account with no information in it.. i hope this helps good luck.
I did basically this by accident lol, because the original email I made as a kid wasn't professional enough to go on my resumes so I made a new one, and then later when I made my website, I set up an email for my domain, and then every time I started a new band I made a new email, and so I just kinda stumbled into having different emails for different things and it makes it really easy to spot scams because they often send things to the wrong address hahaha (along with all the other mistakes scammers make ofc)
Great succinct vid! It would be very useful if you did another on how to transition from using a single email to this architecture that streamlines effort. Currently, I use 3 emails with a single primary I have used for 20 years. I have a password manager with more than 180 accounts which mostly use the primary account. Green fields is one thing. Migrating from a rich legacy appears gargantuan.
I’ve been using Yahoo “disposable” email addresses for 20 years. A unique address for each company or organizations I deal with. The root of the disposable address is not the same as your actual address, so can’t just figure out the real address from it. And I can send from the disposable addresses as well.
There's one small issue with this: any non-existing address that spammers try would end up in your catch-all inbox. So, this also frees up spammers from the burden of trying to guess a valid email address...
@@NaomiBrockwellTV Well, they initially don't; but a soon as one alias gets out, they do. Or if I am tempted to use my domain for anything else, say hosting any website...
@@NaomiBrockwellTV It's not difficult to get a list of valid domain names. That's all they would need to send guesses of valid email addresses using common first names @ each domain.
@@NaomiBrockwellTV Kinda shocked you would ask this. You yourself mentioned several examples of how this could happen!!! Anyone that you give out an email address to using your domain, they could sell your info to mail lists and spammers could easily get ahold of that. All kinds of places that store your email address are CONSTANTLY getting breached and data stolen, so now spammers have the address. And as another person mentioned, domain names are SIMPLE to get hold of!!!
Personally I have multiple emails just for this reason. Additionally I NEVER give my real birthday when asked, they usually want to confirm you are of legal age. Finally, when possible do not agree to the privacy settings! Read the fine print, that is where they say that your information will be sold.
Recently I start to watch your videos. I like your channel. I do need email alias, but I don't know how. I have used Firefox relay. But it only provide 5 alias. Thank you for this video. Your are me angel. ❤️ ☺️ Ps. I am not good in English. But I can understand your perfect pronunciation.
I watched this in 1 go about 6 months ago… learnt a bit and got confused/stressed at the second half…so stopped trying to learn Then emails started annoying me …came back and don’t feel too stressed now and bit by bit it’s getting easier to retain the info😂
Spammers have made use of email aliases for decades, so why not make use of it against spammers? Even Office 365 allows you to create email aliases. Thanks Naomi!
Awesome video Naomi, I am in Australia and we have had some major company data breaches here. Having an alias looks like a good solution to change my email when there is a data breach. I am just in the process of setting this up. You did not mention Startmail in your video. So I am undecided if I should use Startmail or SimpleLogin. Both have unlimited aliases, Startmail is an all-in-one solution and SimpleLogin has more alias features but requires a forwarding address. Protonmail premium cost a lot more than Startmail and SimpleLogin. If you had to choose which would you recommend/use Startmail or SimpleLogin?
I took another approach way back in 1995. My email addr looks like a password. I would NEVER put my name on an email address, except the one I have to have for the company I work for. It's easy to set up Outlook rules to deal with the inbound email.
I love this video. After I watched this, I did it through cloudflare and it is so interesting. Now i have my own email address with my own domaim and it looks like I'm a professional 😏😎 Thank you 🥰
@@JadeSambrook You can generate one from your phone easily enough, or you can have one of the emails remembered for occasions like this...or you can tell them that you don't wish to provide one.
I have watched a few of Naomi's videos and have learned so much. I recently signed up for Proton email and will definitely look into these two options. Thanks for the detailed information to help provide security to our accounts!
I'll never forget this one guy at the first place i worked had a domain since the 90s and his strategy for emails was [servicename]@[domain] and if he ever got spam he would know exactly which service sold his email. it blew my mind
