I have been doing this for well over 10 years and can confirm the approach, with one small tweaks:

The address for friends and family should be split in 2 - one for the really technologically literate ones, who will never do stupid crap with it like using it in a pinterest "Share this!" form, and one for everyone else (who must never learn you didn't give them "best" address because they're clueless).

Also, if you own a few domains, devote a whole cheap one to mailing lists, online subscription and whatever else. Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service (like [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] etc).

This gives you the benefit of seeing who leaked your address when you see spam, of being able to disable them individually, of being able to migrate provider with no impact to your accounts (just repoint your own domain's email forwardings)

> Create a dedicated address everytime you subscribe to a service

I tried this and don’t recommend it.

Yeah, you get the advantage of knowing who leaked your address. But I don’t care. If the ‘spam and lists’ address gets too spammy, I’ll just create another.

The disadvantage is that you have to configure a mail client to send from this address if you ever want to do that, and I found myself doing it far more often than I imagined. Need to write back to a store regarding a transaction? Frequently enough. To my health insurance company for some reason? Of course.

No, the idea is to remove as much friction as possible. This adds friction. Keep it simple.

There are services designed to allow you to think up new email addresses on the fly, with no setup, and still have them delivered. I personally like https://www.spamgourmet.com/ - you can create an identifying address on the fly that also limits the total number of emails you'll receive from that address. It solves all the issues you mentioned - it's frictionless and still allows replies, while preventing spam. The gmail '+' feature works too, but is so high profile that a lot of spammers know how to parse it.

You can also use the + for email adress, [email protected]. No need to register another mail adress for each service. It can lead to problems logging in though, not everyone knows that + is a legal character in mail adresses.

Panix.com has a feature that sidesteps that problem. It accepts any email address that looks like: [email protected], where you can customize "hackernews" to be a mailing list, company, or any text; and "myname" is your actual email address, eg [email protected]. No charge. Works great. Easily filtered.

Disclaimer: just a satisfied customer.

I had enough validation and dictation issues with that approach that I registered a catchall email on a subdomain, so I give out [email protected]. For one thing, anyone wise to that trick will just strip

  /\+[^@]*/

from your address and bypass the fingerprinting.

Can also just get a catchall and forward everything to the same inbox, and then create folders based on the receiving email.

This kind of works. But also realize that if your email makes it into their contacts, then phone apps will harvest this. Things like WhatsApp or LinkedIn will definitely harvest these so it’s not nearly as secure as you believe. You could have double indirection where you create a secret email and give everyone a second secret email and forward all emails from there.

> Get one email address for friends and family. Never ever post it online.

It works until someone sends an email with cat photos to your secret address and all their contact list, and forget to use bcc.

That's why you have one mail for clueless and one for those that do have a clue. Been doing thish for 25? years :-)

Are you using the same address for those that have a clue since 25 years, or you changed it?

(I was probably using my Yahoo! address 25 years ago.)

I was using it until the service blocked Pop3 and Imap a few years ago, then I gave up and moved to gmail and protonmail.

I just set up a wildcard email forwarder on my domain and set up an email address for every domain or website I sign up for (e.g. [email protected]). Keeps everything nicely separated, logins are predictable, and I can track who got my email from where.

It makes certain things more complicated, like authenticating against certain services, or if someone sends and invitation to one of your domain emails, but it works just fine 95% of the time.

I used to have this problem with Gmail because it was easy to receive mail at a new address, but always a 10-minute process to start sending mail from a new address.

I just switched to Fastmail and was pleasantly surprised with their solution. You can set up wildcard response aliases so that if you receive an email to [email protected], when you hit reply, it automatically sends from the [email protected].

I’ve been dealing with that frustrating aspect of Gmail for years, had no idea fastmail had a better solution. Thanks for the heads up!

Oh wow, that’s actually a very compelling reason to look at FastMail, thanks!

Mailbox anxiety goes away after you have a couple thousand unread emails for years. Mark as read is too much work. Whatever.

Just filter all those mail into a unsubscribe folder instead of marking them as read.

Also filter all emails with unsubscribe in their body to that folder. Works like a charm.