Yeah, self-hosting is almost always going to be the “ideal” solution for this sort of stuff, but not everyone has the means (knowledge, time, etc.) or even the reliable internet for that to make sense.

Personally, I know that a few years from now at most, I’ll have probably transitioned to something more custom, but I’m guessing this is going to be a more viable solution for a LOT of people.

You can find a few guides online such as https://blog.holtzweb.com/posts/unlimited-email-forwarding-address-aliases-using-cloudflare/ and https://fyx.me/minis/create-infinite-email-aliases-using-cloudflare-email-routing/

I can’t remember which ones I used specifically, but that first link covers the basics; I just set up the worker to be a lot simpler using regex to map a whole range of possible aliases through instead of hardcoding anything.

For the moment I’m routing things to Gmail (I’ll likely shift to Proton at some point), but I was able to set up labels using my templates (specific prefixes and formats) to easily identify emails I get. For example, the stuff that comes from my site gets its own label for French or English stuff (the site is in both languages) because it’s always formatted as site.{en/fr}.{semi-ranfom-value}@my-domain.com.

Agreed. But in my case it’s less about tracking (especially because with fingerprinting, it’s almost impossible not to be trackable these days unfortunately), and more about knowing who is selling my email to spammers and advertisers.

I just set an equivalent up for myself using a custom domain and a Cloudflare worker.

Since I’m already paying for the domain, it’s essentially free, and I can go crazy with the configuration (using regex to block emails or route them to different accounts).

I even have a bit on my site that randomizes the email people can use to contact me.