Using a separate email address for each contact

Question

A lot of the people I exchange emails with use services such as Google Mail. Recently it occurred to me that Google must maintain a social graph based on who exchanges emails with whom. It bogs me that a Google employee can potentially point to a number of email addresses and say: "These are the individuals X is in touch with."

How about the following approach to rendering the latter a tad more difficult:

1. When I mail someone for the first time, a generic-sounding address (e.g. [email protected] or [email protected]) is generated.
2. The new address is associated with the receiver.
3. The email is sent with the newly generated address being used as the sender.
4. Whenever that specific receiver wants to mail me, they will use the address generated in the first step.

Now for the questions:

• Does anyone use such a scheme?
• Do you think it's any good at all?
• Are there existing solutions?
• What Linux mail client might prove suitable for adding this functionality?
• How to automate the generation of new addresses? Is there a provider offering an API that is sufficiently capable?

Answer 1

Does anyone use such a scheme?

Yes. I know several people who run their a mail server on their own domain. Every new contacts is treated as a potential spammer and everybody gets an unique email address.

Do you think it's any good at all?

That depends on your goals.

It suffices for your "2) address is associated with the receiver."
It is not enough to prevent your ISP or mail provider to track you.

Are there existing solutions?

The closest thing I can come up with are sites such as http://www.mailinator.com/ and http://spamgourmet.com/ . Those are used by lots of people, which means that you can not be tracked down just by looking at the domain. However you still have to trust the mail provider not to leak information.

What Linux mail client might prove suitable for adding this functionality?

No idea.

How to automate the generation of new addresses? Is there a provider offering an API that is sufficiently capable?

That depends on the previous answer.

Answer 2

In addition to Hennes great answer (which implies my approach, but) I want to elaborate on the solution I use:

• I have a personal domain and running my own mail server (well, the hosting package I pay for offers and maintains it).
• I have created a catch-all mailbox, so every mail directed toward my domain will land in my inbox
• Of course a generic spam filter is applied beforehand
• I simply hand out each contact I want to single out, it's custom email like '[email protected]'
• To stop individual spammers, I just put them on the spam list

Now, with this, I do not have to create actual inboxes and I can decide which contacts (if any) I want to pool into the same "virtual inbox".

I have used this for years now and it serves me well.