Taking Back My Inbox in 2025

Oct 29, 2025 · 4 min read

I’ve been trying to take back my relience on Google this year and, as a (very) longstanding Gmail user have finally found a new home for my inbox, along with a new strategy for managing email

The Problems That Needed Fixing

I’ve been using Gmail for my primary email literally since the day it launched. In fact, I managed to grab my (at the time) preferrd alias @gmail.com through a beta invite in 2004. This has been a blessing and a curse. Of course, having all of my emails from the past 20+ years in one place is super handy, and having an email address that everyone I want to know can easily remember is lovely. But the trade-offs are massive when it comes to privacy.

When I say privacy, I mean that in two ways.

Firstly, I don’t love giving Google access to all that info about me - that’s probably the most obvious privacy concern. But the other stems from inevitable hacks and breaches that put some of your details out in the public. Having a single email address registered for every online service, shop, and mailing list makes profiling so much easier, as well as exposes you to guessable logins.

The Solution I Landed On

I now use a paid tier of Proton for pretty much all of my email. I like the privacy elements when it comes to things like their encryption, removal of trackers, and prompts to remove metadata from attachments etc. But that’s only half the story - the real value for me comes from the flexibility that comes with SimpleLogin and being able to separate out your Proton login from your frequently used email addresses.

My account with Proton is an address that I never use to send or receive emails - so that means it’s never out in the wild for anyone to try and log in to. I use 2FA and physical security keys as well, but those are extra levels of security. I like the peace of mind knowing that my actual logon id is something only I know.

For sending emails to actual people, I use a personal domain which is configured with Proton’s MX settings. So that bypasses SimpleLogin and is just managed within Proton. However, I don’t use this address to sign up to anything.

Logins and Mailing Lists etc

Now, with SimpleLogin, I use a different personal domain and in fact use 3 subdomains each for a different purpose: -

One is for my personal things that I care about;
One is for home things which I share with my wife (think utility bills etc);
One is for temporary things I probably don’t want to keep

Then, within Proton, I have labels applied to each when the recipient matches each subdomain.

Each of these is configured within SimpleLogin to allow the creation of on-the-fly aliases and, for the home subdomain, I make use of SimpleLogin’s ability to send aliased emails to multiple mailboxes - one being one of my Proton addresses, and the other being my wife’s email address.

This means I can just register for a site with a completely made up email address using my registered subdomain that we share and we’ll both get the emails in our true inboxes. Think [email protected]

Going a Step Further - Suffixes

As an additional piece of security by obscurity, I add a pseudo-random 6-digit suffix to each email address I register using my aliases. So rather than [email protected] I will use something like [email protected]

The benefit this gives me is that, if there is a leak at Spotify, in the above example, attackers couldn’t infer my other addresses by simply substituting “spotify” for “netflix”, or whatever the case may be.

Additional Benefits

It’s long been acknowledged that you should use a different password for every site you register for, but by using a different email you also get to take control of your inbox in a much more controlled manner. If an email is leaked and suddenly I find I am receiving a load of spam to my [email protected] address, as well as knowing who sold my email/was hacked, I can kill the spam at the source and disable the alias at the click of a button.

Summary

The process of swapping out all of my registered emails (well, most…is it ever truly done?) took several weeks and was very tedious but the benefits have definitely been worth it for me. I feel much more organised and am very happy to have stoped giving Google so much of my personal data. But overall I just feel a lot happier with how I use email now - the shared subdomain is super useful and makes managing household things so much easier (especially as the logins are stored in a Proton Pass vault which I share with my wife).

So yeah, it’s taken a while to land on a setup I’m happy with but I feel like the new setup will hopefully serve me well for the next 20+ years, like Gmail did…before it didn’t.