The problem with this approach is that if any service/spambot does, somehow, get your personal email, you're stuck with crap.
The better solution is to make a whitelist, and only let that in. Then have a convenient means to let people put themselves on your whitelist. And an even easier way to kick them off your whitelist.
And/Or give everyone a unique address. (Possibly with a unified one for "friends and family", if you want to be super strict even combined with the approach in your link)
Sieve filter to put it in folders derived from the name (you can do this dynamically, no need to put every address in there). Now you're playing with power.
For the first time in decades I feel in control of my e-mail again.
This was my original idea to solve the email problem, and I actually started coding it up. Then I realized a whitelist works as well and is much easier to implement.
I'm curious why you even started coding? All it takes is an email
host where you have a catch-all and a sieve filter on a couple of lines.
I saw your whitelist approach before, got a bit inspired, and considered doing the same thing but never got around to it because it seemed like too much of a hassle (it needs to have not only a separate running process but also maintain persistent state). Funny how perceptions differ.
While both share some benefits I think they're somewhat orthogonal. Your approach mostly works for humans mailing you individually (as you noted) while the biggest benefit for mine is for group- mass- and automated e-mail.
IMO the golden thing would be to combine them, only using the whitelist for a subset of addresses you actually use for personal comms.
> I'm curious why you even started coding? All it takes is an email host where you have a catch-all and a sieve filter on a couple of lines.
Well my original idea was to have a unique email address for each person. So I needed a way to generate one on the fly. But now that you mention it, a catch all would have worked - I could generate the email even after giving the person his/her unique address.
Still, there would be some burden to actually create those custom email addresses every time I meet someone new.
The other side of the coding would be to ensure that when I email someone, the From/Reply-To addresses are the ones for that person. But what if I need to email 2 different people?
For me, having a single email address for family/friends wouldn't work - it always gets leaked somehow.
Yes, I use the Fastmail VIP feature for this. I makes a vast difference.
I’ve got tens of thousands of emails in my inbox, even after filtering, and, at my age, I simply don’t want to spend an hour a day pawing over email. I just let it recede into the past. If someone pings me about something I “missed”, I can always dig up their email.
> The problem with this approach is that if any service/spambot does, somehow, get your personal email, you're stuck with crap.
Is this really a problem? I've had my email address for years, am active in the tech industry and have hundreds of accounts set up with that address, and yet I get near-zero spam.
The vast majority of services support opting out of marketing emails and respect that, those that don't are rare and can be dealt with an email rule, GDPR complaint, or both.
On average, I probably get a single email per day that actually lands in my inbox, and those are emails I actually want to receive.
Yes, it's a problem for some. I've had the same email address for almost 20 years.
For me, marketing emails is spam - even if I signed up for it. Often you need to sign up temporarily to access a service, and their signup option doesn't always let you specify what types of emails you want to receive.
> and can be dealt with an email rule, GDPR complaint, or both.
Both take more effort than a simple whitelist based system. I simply press a keystroke and the address is out of my whitelist.
I also can now sign up for anything if I need to and never have to put in any effort to prevent it from hitting my inbox. When you step back and think about it, it's hard to recommend "Really think whether you want to sign up, and later unsubscribe/set an email rule" vs "Sign up, and don't worry - it'll never go to your inbox."
For most of my email life, I followed your route: Be careful about what I signed up for, and spend time filtering/unsubscribing. When I switched to whitelists, it was just so much better. Of all the things one has to deal with in the world, spending time tending to the inbox is just wasteful.
In the last day, I received 14 emails. 2 were personal. A few were alerts I've set up (e.g. credit card spending exceeding X amount) - I wouldn't want to lose these, but I also wouldn't want them in my inbox. The rest were for things I signed up for because I needed to buy something but did not offer an opt out option while signing up. I'm not going to spend any time unsubscribing from them.
Sieve filter to put it in folders derived from the name (you can do this dynamically, no need to put every address in there). Now you're playing with power.
For the first time in decades I feel in control of my e-mail again.