Encrypt all the things!

[ Bit of a dredge as I've been away... ]

if one of them is a gmail address you can use the + to do this

so test+company@gmail.com would go to the test@gmail.com inbox, and you can then filter on it.

The problem with + addresses like this, e.g.

username+lfgss@example.com
username+bbc@example.com

is that most places that want to link your accounts (see V's post here: https://www.lfgss.com/comments/14838117/) is that it is trivial for them to remove everything after the + and they've got your base address to compare.

[ Long ago when I ran my own sendmail daemon (Don't do this kids) I changed the plus addressing symbol to _ so I could do username_lfgss@example.com and not struggle against sites that prevented addresses with + symbol in. ]

This also goes for gmail addresses where you can move the . around at will, i.e.

jo.bloggs@gmail.com is the same as job.loggs@gmail.com

They disingenuous lot will just see a gmail.com address and remove all of the dots before the @ as they know that address will still work (and anything after a +). That can then be compared with other sites.

My own paranoia means I've moved to a model where I have my own domain for email (but no longer run the MTA myself!) and try and use unique addresses for each signup and, more importantly, the unique addresses are not linked to the site in question, i.e. I wouldn't use:-

lfgss@example.com bbc@example.com etc

as it makes it relatively trivial to guess what that same persons email is on a subsequent site. I'd just pick something random each time, e.g.

LFGSS: dave@example.com BBC: kettle@example.com

It also means I can kill off much of the spam that automatically arrives to addresses like tumblr@ or twitter@ even though I've never ever used those aliases in my life.

It's then simple to set up filters to move things into the right mailboxes (and name them appropriately, e.g. "LFGSS - dave" and "BBC - kettle".

I need to rejig my email a bit as I've still got one legacy account that is POP3 and needs moving over to IMAP, but it is an address I've had for a long time and so it gets quite a bit of spam (and my existing spam solution needs partially rewriting to handle IMAP).