this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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So i've set up a custom domain to use with protonmail and was curious if anyone else uses the catch all in this manner.

I was thinking that when a new account is created on $website I would use a custom email address that would then be caught by the 'catch-all'. So say the domain is catata.fish, and the website is target.com, then when signing up I would use target@catata.fish. Previously when using gmail I would use email+target@gmail.com.

Does anyone see any issues doing it this way? Thanks!

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[–] kat@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is exactly how I use it. Basically, if you receive spam on webshop@catata.fish you know exactly who sold/"lost" your address.

One downside is that you cannot send from this address, but you usually don't need that anyway. And in the rare case that you do, you can just create an actual alias.

[–] billygoat@catata.fish 2 points 1 year ago

Ah that is a good thing to keep in mind. Proton allows 15 email addresses on the account I have so I could always create one and delete it later.

[–] yote_zip@pawb.social 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Assuming ProtonMail supports catch-all (I don't use Proton), this is fine and a typical use of the catch-all. You may get weird looks when you give a business their name back as your email, and if anyone figures out that you have a catch-all they might just spam you regardless, at any email address they want, e.g. "icanfreelyspamyou@catata.fish". I would add a string of numbers/letters at the end, like "target.akr8@catata.fish" so you can be sure when someone sells your email.

All said, it's a little bit weak to any determined adversary. Any human who figures out your plan can easily start playing around with it - Target may sell your email as "thisguywantsspam@catata.fish" and you'll never know who sold it.

Edit: Also, you're trivial to track across different accounts if anyone figures out that you own the email domain.

[–] billygoat@catata.fish 1 points 1 year ago

Makes sense. I’m not too worried about privacy in that regard considering bad actors are going to do what they do. This was more for the automated systems, plus I don’t see how it would be any less privacy focused than just a standard email + aliases.

[–] Mio@feddit.nu 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Don't use + as delimiter. It is an email standard for alias and will send the email to the none alias version inbox. Better to use a different delimiter, like minus, -, instead. Not sure how easy it is to do with Proton.

I keep a whitelist of email addresses allowed, the rest is therefore blocked. This means I can't send to random@example.com and get to the inbox.