For about a year now, I have been creating unique email addresses for every account I have. I wanted to do this in order to reduce the risk of credential stuffing when one of the services I use is inevitably compromised, but I also needed something that was trivial to use and create unique addresses.
- Create a ProtonMail account and signed up for the Visionary level account, which is roughly $360 US/year. You could achieve the same thing with the Professional level account which is roughly $84 US/year.
- Register a new domain that only gets use for account signups. The main criteria for this should be something that is easy to remember and cheap, but otherwise any arbitrary domain name is fine.
- Connect the domain name to ProtonMail using the instructions here, and create a master account with that domain.
- Enable the catch-all feature for the domain using the instructions here, and select the master account for the catch-all recipient.
The catch-all feature means that any email that is sent to an address that does not exist will be delivered to the catch-all address.
So now you can make up anyaddress@customdomain to use for accounts. I typically just use the name of the service. So if I’m signing up for a Spotify account, for example, I’m going to use spotify@customdomain. For Netflix, I’m going to use netflix@customdomain. And so on.
Emails sent to those addresses will be delivered to your master account where you can receive them.
Occasionally, you may need to reply to one of these emails. In that case, create an address for the particular address you need to reply to, make your reply, and once whatever issue you need to resolve is resolved, delete that address (to free up the address for future use).
For example, if I needed to reply to an email sent to netflix@customdomain, I would create an account in my customdomain called netflix. Then I’d make my reply and wait for any follow-up, etc. Once my support or billing issue was resolved, I’d archive those email messages and then delete the netflix address.