More than one email address: a necessity

I had several email addresses pretty much since I started using the internet. Three reasons prompted me to create more than one email address, more than 15 years ago:

  • being able register multiple times to the same website, service or game
  • hiding my real identity
  • protecting myself from spam (by giving throw-away addresses to dodgy websites).

Having new, free email addresses was never really a problem, free email services have existed for decades. Keeping track of all these email addresses was, on the other hand, not always that easy. I had to remember my usernames - of course, my super safe password 12399 was the same for every single service and website I used.

Automatic email forwarding

Email redirection wasn’t obvious at the time. Not all services allowed that (some of them are still limited in 2020).

At the time, the solution that worked well for me was importing emails. Desktop email applications allowed me to connect my other accounts: it would pull new emails from all of them. It added a bit of delay to receive emails, but at least it worked.

But it lacked a necessary feature: sychronisation. Accessing the same inbox from two different computers was a nightmare. Marking emails as read almost never propagated correctly, synchronisation issues happened all the time, making the initial synchronisation took hours.

Enter Gmail. Gmail had the “always synchronised” property shared with the other webmail services, without their major drawbacks: low capacity, page reloads after every action, limited functionality. More importantly, it had the POP3 import available.

At the time, Gmail was ages ahead of the competition. It came at the cost of privacy, and being bombarded with ads. Now, the ads are gone, but the tracking certainly isn’t. I’m not advising to start using Gmail if you currently aren’t, because plenty of good alternative solutions exist.

Create more email addresses on the fly

Never run out of email addresses

With Gmail

wildcards: GMAIL . and +. Most people don’t know about them, mainly because they’re not advertised anywhere on Google websites.

Some (rare) services don’t accept + in email addresses

These are all equivalent:

Make your own

Make the ultimate wildcard! If you have your own domain, there are several services offering wildcard forwarding, with free tiers big enough for personal use.

Mailgun is such a service. After register with Mailgun, you can add a new domain you own by following Sending -> Domains -> Add New Domain. Unless your domain registrar limits the number of characters in your DNS records, create a 2048 bits key.

Let’s use the wild.cards domain name as an illustration (.cards is a valid top-level domain). With this domain, we will be able to use email adresses like thomas@wild.cards, hello@wild.cards or whatever-else-you-want-to-be-here@wild.cards.

If you’re after a cheap domain, try your luck using a comparator such as https://www.domcomp.com. Using a registrar you already use for other domains is a good idea - otherwise, try to use popular services (GoDaddy, Namecheap, OVH…). Exotic services sometimes lack a necessary feature: sychronisation. Accessing the same inbox from two different computers was a nightmare. Marking emails as read almost never propagated correctly, synchronisation issues happened all the time, making the initial synchronisation took hours.

Note: I was very disappointed with Porkbun.

Now that I’m not after saving every Euro I can anymore, I’m simply using OVH for all my domain names. DNS configuration and email redirections are very easy to set up, it’s not very expensive (depending on domain extensions), the billing is very simple.

[To be continued in part 2]