Creating A Private Email Address
Above all, your email is the key to your digital life. It’s your digital home safe. The center of your kingdom. The holy grail of important things to protect. It’s all these things because of what you can do with it.
Forget your bank password? Reset it via email.
Wanting to revisit the mid-2000s and log into your Myspace but have long since forgotten your password (mine surely has something to do with Tom Welling of Smallville fame)? Reset it via email.
Have too much to drink and lock out your Tinder account by fat fingering your password too many times? Reset it via email.
In fact, you can even reset your email password via email if you have a recovery email set up (don’t forget THIS password).
Due to the power that this one account holds over all the others (*insert One Ring from Lord of the Rings comment here*), we need to approach it with a special reverence with another layer of protection from the others.
If you’re following standard account protection policies, like the ones we’ve talked about before, you’ve already got a unique password protecting your email account. One that isn’t used anywhere else — thus preventing a data leak from some random social media account (like Facebook in September 2018, and March and April of 2019 and [fill in the blank here] 2020) compromising everything else in your life. In addition, hopefully you’re protecting your email account with a multi-factor method of authentication — whether it is receiving a text message with a 6-digit code whenever you attempt to log in, or something more advanced like an authentication app or physical security key. But I’d like to propose yet another layer of protection for the accounts that are truly important to you: a private email address.
What I mean by a private email address is that it’s one that you don’t give out to anyone that knows you, or really, any real person. It doesn’t contain your name, or any other data unique to your identifiers. Doesn’t contain your favorite sports team, high school graduation date, or birth year. Heck it doesn’t even have to be a pronounceable English word. It’s primary, and really only, purpose is to safeguard the accounts that are tied to it by not being tied to you.
It doesn’t matter who it is — whether it be a thief, co-worker, Wario cosplayer, ex-spouse — they can’t break into an account they don’t know about. Even if they somehow manage to gain access to your public email address, they won’t even know that the other exists (*cue M.I.B. theme song — “We straight don’t exist, no names and no fingerprints”*)
Ideally, every financial account you have would be tied to this account. Banks, investments, tax return software, etc. You’d want to avoid using social media accounts with it since often those accounts allow others to see or otherwise scrape your email address, thus enabling what you meant to stay private to be widely known.
Yes this will take a little bit of initial effort on your part — going through each important account and changing the email address tied to the account, then replying to the verification email to finalize the change — but once that’s done, everything should run smoothly on its own without any additional changes needed on your part. A little effort now will result in a more secure future for you and your family’s lives.
Stay safe out there
