[gowld]

Moreso, it's good to teach people that valid email address are in fact valid.

This part:

> Especially since all these companies ask for and verify your cell phone number

is true, though.

and

> The one outlier is political campaigns: they'll share your email till the end of time.

Because politicians exempted themselved from anti-spam laws, as they do with most laws.

[lazyjeff]

> Because politicians exempted themselved from anti-spam laws, as they do with most laws.

This was the most puzzling thing to me. The politicians that I saw on TV as adamantly pro-privacy, anti-tracking, who made a lot of sense in everything they were saying -- you contribute a single dollar (because they want to show grassroots support for their pro-individuals campaign) and they IMMEDIATELY give your email and survey responses to everyone in their party, including to state-level campaigns in places across the country.

There was no indication on the donation form that any of my personal details would be used for anything except to show that they had a lot of grassroots supporters.

Not only that, but their emails are so clickbait-ey like "lazyjeff, you are the reason that [hated politician] is destroying democracy."

[autoexec]

> Because politicians exempted themselved from anti-spam laws, as they do with most laws.

Tons of companies will share/sell/buy your email address. Politicians just stand out because they're shameless about spamming, but email addresses aren't always used for spamming. They can also be used to tie logins to names and accounts across services. They can be harvested for various information they contain. Even folks with just one email address often give away their name, the year they were born, their hobbies, etc. Using an email address like [e-mail] and [e-mail] also tells a story about you and what services you use. Every scrap of data that can be collected helps build a profile of your life and email addresses are a part of that, even when they aren't used to clog your inbox with garbage.

I'd recommend using less obvious names, but I still don't see a problem with creating unique addresses for various services that demand an email account. If nothing else it's a great way to compartmentalize the crap they'll send you (spam or not). If someone questions why you have [e-mail] that should really just be a 2 second conversation.