[raddan]

You can take this to an extreme (like I do) and use a different email address for every party with whom you communicate. It makes it rather obvious who leaked your email address, and also easy to shut them out (looking at you ActBlue!). It also leads to some amusing personal interactions. I once rebooked a cancelled flight on JetBlue at the ticket counter. When the agent saw my email she said “wow, you must really like JetBlue.” I just nodded but I was laughing inside because it’s definitely the opposite!

[Dusseldorf]

I do this as well, and occasionally people get confused and think I work for the company I'm interacting with ([e-mail] is close enough to [e-mail], I guess.) I usually don't bother to correct them, in case it gets me better treatment :)

[fragmede]

The problem is that's guessable. I add a nonce/salt/bit of random chars; [e-mail] to compensate.

[Terretta]

This is how iCloud's "Hide My Email" (suggested to you by Safari at online account creation or filling out any email field basically) works. And then it remembers those random chars for that domain. Also ensures the email delivers to you.

[throwaway808081]

You're dealing with a different type of actor if that's necessary.

[fragmede]

the problem is you don't know which actor you're going to be dealing with so you have to start off on that foot with everybody.

[godelski]

I do this too, though sometimes it leads to confusion.

FWIW, Firefox's Relay integrates into Bitwarden so you can generate emails on the fly when creating new accounts. Downside and upside is that I never know what my email address or password is.

The huge benefit is I can write down an email that'll work because I own @somedomain.mozmail.com and it'll always redirect. I do the same thing with cloudflare because I also own myrealname.com

But honestly I hate all this because the real problem is that email is a bottleneck and it is stickier than phone numbers. But my email is floating around on a bunch of lists because I've had it for years. Frankly, gmail is pretty bad about removing spam. There's a lot of spam I catch using simple filters from Thunderbird.

The extra benefit is that I'm planning on moving away from gmail and all these relays make it easier to redirect everything to a new location. So I still recommend it. You can shutdown addresses that are being abused or shared more easily but that's hard to do with your long term email address.

[Terretta]

Aka iCloud "Hide My Email"