Here’s how I solved email spam.
- Create a new email on a privacy focused platform (I chose proton)
- Sign up for an email relay service (Firefox relay, SimpleLogin, etc…)
- Only give out your actual email to friends and family and tell them not to share it with others or services without your permission.
- Change your email on ALL your services to a newly generated relay addresses. Only use relay addresses for any online service moving forward.
- Monitor the old email for a while to find any important services you might have missed.
- When you get spam from a relay address, you can decide to use the normal unsubscribe option, or the nuclear disable relay option. That’s it.
Bonus 01: since your changing all your services manually, you can decide to delete accounts you don’t need anymore.
Bonus 02: each relay is unique to the service so you can tell when a service either got hacked or sold your info.
Side Note: there are setups similar to this for credit cards. I use Wise.com for online transactions with 3 different “virtual” cards that I can destroy if they get exposed.
You could always give out a relay to your family and friends as well. Both Firefox relay and SimpleLogin have custom domains so you can give you mom an email address like [email protected]