I’m slowly thinking of things that I’ve hacked together over the years that might be of interest or use to others, and this one is next on the list. I’ll say at the outset that there might be things missing here as I’m having to reconstruct the whole process from memory.

When registering for websites that you might only use once or twice, or where you don’t particularly trust their privacy policy, an throwaway email address is particularly handy. If they start to abuse it, or it leaks or is stolen, you can just discard the address. There are services like Sneakemail that will do this for you, but being a bit of a control freak I wanted something that I could control. Like many others I have a vanity domain and my own mailserver, which runs on a Linux virtual private server provided by the brilliant people at Bytemark (who get a well-earned plug!).