That said, no solution is perfect, and I expect that there will likely always be situations where you will be forced to fall back to a regular email address.
[1] https://github.com/wesbos/burner-email-providers/pull/339
Sometimes "[service]" is also shortened like "hackernews -> hn" to dodge the ban on service name in the e-mail address that some service providers apparently have.
> you can still attempt to reach me at [email protected] not if the catch-all address is actually /dev/null and the totallynotyourservice@ has to be mined from somewhere because it's random.
Overall, I think it depends on the obfuscation strategy. It's true that having a unique @mydomain.com part is a big giveaway and someone could theoretically track one's activity by searching for all e-mail addresses coming from the domain.
My use-case is more to use unique e-mail addresses to throw off credential stuffing attacks, not become untrackable/avoid all spam. For the tracking use-case I generally think several times if I want to register somewhere at all and try the usual routes first (mailinator, random old addresses on public e-mail).
- My other addresses are unguessable.
- It's far easier to block emails sent to a single alias. With my own domain, I'll have to go and add a filter into which I copy-paste the particular alias I want to block. With Relay, I can just open the dashboard and hit the toggle next to the alias labelled with the domain I used it on.
- I was looking for ways to give Mozilla money for a long time (though now I'm working there, so I guess I'm also taking its money).
In general, my setup now is to keep using my old setup for long-term accounts with somewhat more reliable services, and use Relay for e.g. requesting a quotation or having a single thing shipped to me.