I can’t speak for @qupfer, but my use case is this: for my mail domain example.com
, I’ve created a catch-all domain catchall.example.com
where every mail to any address is forwarded to user@example.com
. Now, whenever I have to register on a website, I can just make up any address and create an account for it. This way, should user data be leaked in the future from this particular website, I can uniquely trace its origins, because the alias tells me which service was responsible for the leak.
Temporary addresses don’t really fit this use case, because
- they have to exist before the address is used, so I would have to access the management UI every time I want to create a new account (and accounts are everywhere today!)
- they have an expiration date by default, but I don’t want the addresses to time out because it still is associated to an account (I know that the expiration date can be changed, but this again requires additional configuration)
- they are random, and whenever a temporary alias (accidentially) timed out I would never again be able to access the account in cases where mailbox access is required
Address tags also don’t fit my use case (apart from suffering the same problem as described in this thread), because
- nowadays, every spammer knows about them and just assumes that anything before the
+
is the actual address, and simple removes the tag before selling your personal data
- the
+
is an unusual character for mail addresses, and websites with bad validation don’t accept them (I’ve encountered this situation multiple times, which is the reason I switched to a catch-all domain)
- the address gets rather long an clumsy to type on a mobile device