Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Privacy@Lemmy.ml : How can I make email sub-addresses with only letters or numbers and no special characters like plus? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by TheTwelveYearOld@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I want a bulletproof way to give email sub-addresses, since some websites strip out special characters like + and .. I have an idea for how it could work, let's say my email is TheTwelveYearOld@Reddit.com and I have the following:

All emails sent to TheTwelveYearOld@ get blocked
I specify a suffix that would be used instead of +, perhaps "From"
I whitelist phrases that go after "From": TheTwelveYearOldFromDoorDash, TheTwelveYearOldFromGoogle, TheTwelveYearOldFromReddit

Are there any services that can do this? I'm thinking I should make my own domain for emails that way my email addresses aren't tied to any companies and I can easily switch.

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[–] kevincox@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago

The answer is yes. The receiver can do whatever they want with the "localpart" of the email address.

However you will need to find a provider that supports it. For available services you are probably looking at one of two options:

Get your own domain, you can then probably just filter to the To address however you want.
Use a email relay/masking service. This will allow you to generate "aliases" that forward to your regular email address.

If you want full control you can run your own email server. For example that is what I do. I generate addresses in the form of {description}-{signature}@me.example. So if they try to remove stuff the signature will fail and the mail will get rejected (well actually just heavily weighted as spam). I do this using Rspamd with a custom rule written in Lua. Full details of this setup are here: https://kevincox.ca/2022/07/07/signed-email-addresses/