How many personal email addresses do you have? I have 54. How much crap do you have in your Inbox? I have zero.
Once I saw someone with 198,000 emails in her Inbox, 197,000 of them unread. I was horrified. Her mail server was syncing all that garbage, eating up bandwidth, battery life, and common sense.
This nightmare is easy to beat, and I’m going to tell you how. If you’re interested, read on.
⓵ The best thing you can do is buy your own domain and connect it to an independent email hosting service in a good jurisdiction, such as Proton Mail, using the MX protocol. This gives you maximum freedom and privacy.
⓶ Never give your real address out on the internet. Give out only its “aliases”, additional addresses that lead to the real one. With icloud.com you get five free aliases, while with gmail.com you can create as many aliases as you like by inserting dots into your real address.
⓷ Set up Rules at the mail-server level, rather than in the email client, telling the server what to do with emails that meet certain criteria.
That’s it! Let me show you how it works in my own case.
I have just one real address, on a personal Belgian domain: the registrar is German, the email hosting is Swiss. This carefully guarded address is known only to a small circle of people closest to me. The other 53 addresses are aliases and forwards, from which all the information automatically flows into folders according to rules I have defined. Each alias has its own purpose.
For example, I sign up for some toxic service, say an online store called Urod, and I already know they’re going to bury me in crap. So I create the alias urod@kobzar.be and hand it over to those bastards without a second thought. Sure enough, they bombard me with junk, the bastards, and even resell my address to their partners. Who could possibly have seen that coming! But all of it automatically goes into a ten-level-deep folder.
I use that alias for as long as I need the Urod store, and then I simply delete urod@kobzar.be. The spammers are left seething helplessly as they read the error message returned by my server. They will never find the real me.
When my email client pings, it is always a genuine email from someone I actually know.
The Holy of Holies, the Inbox of my sacred email account, is kept empty. There are only two or three unanswered messages in it, while everything else sits in 16 thematic folders. Everything is regularly backed up locally and encrypted. I can easily find any email I need, provided I once considered it important enough to drag into a folder. Some of the messages date back to the 1990s, and it can be quite amusing to read them again 100 years later.
Thanks to my simple protection system, over the past 20 years I haven’t received a single piece of unsolicited crap in my Inbox. Everything there is strictly real, from real people within a small, clearly defined circle of my choosing. No Urod is ever going to break through to me directly.
It makes me genuinely sad that such a brilliant invention as email, created in Geneva, incidentally (my arguments are here), has turned into a spam dump for so many people. This is not difficult to beat!
Other people’s messengers are transient; while your clean email is eternal.
Make Email Great Again!