Whether you have one or four email addresses it doesn’t matter, they all point to you. Perhaps the real you, Your personal Facebook, Twitter or banking email. maybe you have one that’s for notification means, competitions and for spam that has never been put with your real name. The point is every email address can be seen as an identifier for “someone”.

An email account for everything

Gmail usually keeps out spam well but occasionally you will get something slip through and be left wondering how did they get my email, who passed (sold) it on? Unless you are creating new emails for every service, forum, account, social-media and online store finding out the culprit would be hard.

The best you can do in this case is break it down as an email for: Importance, Social media, shopping, forums and finally services. Depending on the amount of times you have given out (used) the email this should give you a decent idea who is in the game for selling customers data.

Free unique email services

Free services and browser addons like Temp mail and Guerilla mail offer emails addresses that can be temporary and protect from spam and tracking. A new Chrome browser addon IdBloc provides a unique email for each service you use.

These anonymous and “random” emails help break down internet tracking by not helping ads be targeted or giving away your real id /profile. It’s just another step yet a crucial one in being more anonymous on the net aswell as making those that thrive on profile built with data work harder.

It points to you

If you had signed up to Facebook with a certain email and then signed up to a service or forum or did online shopping, those that potentially have access to your email can simply put your email address into Facebook to find you. Unless you went through the privacy settings on Facebook and turned off “find me by my email” which im not sure about others but that’s very important to me.

Whilst spam is being filtered out at better rates and isn’t as effective in recent years your email address/es still serves the same purpose as an identifier and a personal one to the extent you choose. It will be of your best interest to handle what email address you give out and where.