Personal + business · Email hygiene

Give your inbox fewer ways to leak.

30 September 2026 · didntask.ai field notes

You can keep an email address for years and still stop handing the same one to every form, shop and public directory. Start by separating the jobs your addresses do.

Give different addresses different jobs

Our suggestion: keep a private address for important accounts, a public address for enquiries and aliases for signups. The point is to make one noisy source easier to contain. It isn’t anonymity, and it won’t erase copies of an address you already published.

A forwarding alias gives another party a different address while routing messages into your existing inbox. As one example, Apple’s Hide My Email generates random addresses and requires iCloud+. Check your own provider’s alias options and reply behavior before choosing a service.

Try an alias with a non-critical account first. Confirm where mail arrives and which address appears when you reply. Keep a private note of which service uses which alias. Don’t disable an address that is still needed for sign-in or recovery without updating those accounts first.

Review where you publish contact details

A portfolio needs a way to contact you. It usually doesn’t need your private login address on every page. Consider a dedicated enquiry alias, and revisit old bios, conference profiles, PDFs and account visibility settings. Reduce what you publish; don’t make legitimate customers solve a puzzle to reach you.

Writing an address as “name [at] company [dot] com” is easy for a person to reconstruct, and should not be treated as a serious access control. Decide whether that information actually needs to be public.

Use the controls already in your mailbox

The FTC recommends marking unwanted mail as spam, using provider filters and blocking unwanted addresses or domains. Check the junk folder occasionally for mistakes. Use unsubscribe tools for legitimate lists you no longer want. FTC: getting less spam.

If a message looks suspicious, don’t follow its links to “confirm” your identity or fix an account problem. Open the known service directly instead. Our recommended habit is to separate an annoying newsletter from a possible phishing message before acting.

Know what each layer buys you

• An alias separates an exposed address from your main one.
• A broker opt-out asks a particular service to stop distributing a profile.
• A mailbox rule handles messages after they arrive.
• Account security protects access; it doesn’t stop strangers writing to you.

These are different jobs. None makes a public email address invisible. If an address is already widely circulated, prioritize keeping useful mail reachable while reducing interruptions.