➡ Data breaches can happen to anyone, even big companies like Yahoo, Marriott, and Facebook. It’s important to take personal responsibility for our cybersecurity, being mindful of the information we share online. Using an email alias, a different email that points to your original one, can help protect your information. If the alias is compromised, you can simply shut it off, keeping your original email safe.

➡ The text discusses the use of email aliases to protect against spam and phishing attacks. It suggests using random characters for the alias and adding a description for personal reference. The text also introduces Anon Mail, a part of a suite of software services that includes a VPN, email and calendar, file sharing, and more. Lastly, it recommends using a local password manager, Keepass, to securely store all passwords, suggesting the use of a single master password to protect all others.

➡ The Above Agency, a privacy-first company, offers devices and software that don’t track users, cutting out big tech companies. They have their own data center in the US and design their own phone and laptop solutions. Their products, including a de-Googled phone, are user-friendly and integrate well with each other. They also provide support and resources for their customers, aiming to create a safe space for communication without reliance on big tech.

➡ Using unique email aliases for each account helps protect your privacy. If an account is compromised, you can identify the source and stop using that alias, reducing spam and data leaks. This method, suggested by James Corbett, is appreciated by many of his followers who also contribute their experiences and feedback. It’s part of a learning process to improve our digital safety.

Welcome back friends. Welcome back to another edition of Solutions Watch. I’m your host James Corbett of CorbettReport.com here in August of 2025 with an important update about an important story. You know the story that I’m talking about, namely the data leak that happened@corbettreport.com and tens of thousands of other websites at the end of July after a WordPress plugin called GiveWP had a update with a serious security flaw that released the names and email addresses of all of those sites users, well, donors specifically, I should say all of the people who use the GiveWP plugin more specifically.

So what does that mean? Well, as I explained last week, that means that some, not all, but some of the Corbett report members had their names and email addresses of leaked exposed in a data leak that was not visible to the average person just looking at the website, but was in the code of the website for five days before the problem was discovered and shut down. The data is no longer there on the website, but it was there for several days and I think this is a pretty serious security breach. Now thankfully, once again, let me stress, no financial information of any kind of was exposed, no passwords, no personal information other than names and email addresses.

And last week I thought it was site usernames and email addresses, but no, it was names, as in whatever name was typed in to the membership signup form that I have been using for the past year and a half. If you ever use that form and typed your name in, it recorded that and it was exposed in the data leak. In fact, even if you tried to to sign up, given that membership form, even if you weren’t successful, I have seen a few instances of that where it still preserved that information and barfed it up during this security breach.

Obviously an incredibly serious privacy violation. I take it very seriously, apparently more seriously than all the rest of the IT world because still in all this time now, it’s been two weeks since this first took place, a week since it’s been exposed, and in all of that time, in all of the spaces online, the hacker news and all those types of places, I have seen precisely one news article about this incident, one from bleeping Computer, that was putting it specifically in the context of piehole, which I gather is some sort of ad blocker. I don’t use it myself, but apparently it is well known and they, they found the problem on their own site and reported it and something like 30,000 email addresses were leaked there and they take it very seriously.

They were very concerned and they were not happy with GiveWP’s response to this, nor was I. And if you are interested in reading that response, I will throw in the link in the show notes giveWP privacy incident, what happened and what’s next and go read through that and come to your own conclusions about it. Personally, I think that they are taking exactly, exactly the wrong position on this. They seem to think that the biggest problem was that this problem was reported in on GitHub so that people could see about it. Oh no. And our reputation has been damaged.

Don’t worry guys, we put in new protocols so that people can privately tell us about the security flaws in our plugins. Okay, I guess that is one step, but seems to me that the more important point about all of this is that this major security breach, this data violation that took place as a result of this plugin was not found, was not, was not tested before this update was rolled out by GiveWP. It was not found by GiveWP. It was found by a third party and reported to them a week later. That seems like that’s the real problem that should be addressed by GiveWP.

But it has not been. Of course this is why I am not using GiveWP ever again. I have disabled the plugin. It is gone. As a result, I am working on a new membership signup form that’s going to take at least a few more days to get implemented. So in the meantime if you are interested in signing up to become a corporate report member, of course you can do through substack, the PO box, bank transfer, crypto, etc. You can get in touch with me if you have any questions about that. Or you can wait for the new and secure membership sign up form.

And my apologies again for all of this mess. But as I say, I think I am taking this more seriously than most other people are. It’s only names and email addresses. These email addresses were snarfed up by spam bots and I have heard from multiple people that yes, I suddenly started receiving a flood of spam last week. So we know that this has occurred and I think that this is an important problem. And it could have been worse. I suppose it could have been financial information, it could have been passwords, but it still is bad enough.

And interestingly in all of this it seems that I and the Corbett report seem to be really truly the first site on the planet to understand, recognize and report on this. And there’s a specific reason for that. A reason that I mentioned, alluded to in my previous data leak announcement. So go back and watch that video if you haven’t yet. I do make mention of the salting your data solutions watch that I did a couple of years ago where I made the point if you don’t have to give your real legal name and whatever your real email address or anything else to any given website, don’t do so give false information.

If for no other reason, maybe you’re not protecting yourself from the NSA or whoever. What big snooping agencies can probably see into the guts of your computer and matter what you do, but at the very least for incidents like this, it can help protect you. And I did mention the concept of email aliases and I mentioned that there are several many corporate report members who thankfully are savvy enough to use email aliases. What is that? Well, as I explained last time, it’s when you give a specific email to a specific site and you only give that email address to that one site so that when you start receiving spam to that email address, you know, oh, that site has been compromised.

The data has come from that website, which is exactly what happened. People started receiving spam emails to their Corbett report specific email addresses and they knew, hey, there’s something going on here and they got in touch with me including and hats off and gold star. I hope everybody in the comments section and everywhere else is very appreciative specifically to Froude Klestival, who you will remember as previous guest on Solutions Watch where we talked about fairy tales and children’s stories. You’ve probably seen him in the comment section. He is a member who’s been around for several years now and he was the one who discovered this problem and reported it to GiveWP.

He deserves all the credit for that. So thank you very much Ferud for your excellent detective work there. And he knew about it because he was receiving spam to his corporate report specific email alias. Oh, something’s going on here. And as I say, several people got in touch with me which is why I knew something was happening and managed to find the detect the problem, shut down the plugin as quickly as I did. It could have been, who knows, could have been weeks before anyone found it if it wasn’t for that. So today we’re going to talk about that concept of an email alias.

What is this? How do you set up an email alias, a specific email just for one particular website that will direct back to your email address? How do you go about doing that? What does that mean? What do you need to know and consider when you’re doing that. There’s a lot of questions. So to answer those questions, I’m going to bring on someone who has some answers and someone that I hope you’re familiar with, namely Hakeem Anwar of abovephone.com the above agency. You will hopefully already know about Above Phone from. Well, it’s been mentioned in many different independent media sites, but he’s also been a guest on Solutions Watch specifically a couple of times.

One time a couple of years ago, we were talking about take back our tech and then earlier this year we were talking about why aren’t you using xmpp? So here he is on the program. Hakeem, thank you for your time. Let’s get down to brass tacks. What is an email alias and why might someone be interested in using one? Yeah, James. So I was sitting there, I forgot what night it was. I think it was a weekend. And my personal email, which usually doesn’t get any emails, I started getting ads for sexy singles in my area and I knew something was wrong.

I was like, what, what happened? And I was like, the court. When I saw your announcement, I was like, the Corvette report. Oh my God, they ruined everything. No, just kidding. It’s, it wasn’t a terrible leak. You know, they, these things happen and I really appreciate the guys, you, the way you guys handled it, but you know, this doesn’t happen just alternative media. It also happens to companies with multi million dollar IT budgets. Yahoo lost 3 million records in 2013 and then another 500 million the next year. Marriott, the big hotel change, lost 500 million records, which some of them included credit cards and passports.

And then Facebook had its entire site scraped, all 530 million users because they let people find each other with phone numbers. So, you know, this kind of stuff happens. And as long as at least it wasn’t like tea, which was meant to be the safe space for women, but they just left that completely unprotected. So I think, I think the, these things are always going to happen. And what I’m going to talk about today is self responsibility. But before I go into that, I just want to shout. James and the Corvette Report team out for how they handled it.

Literally the next day after they found out they had already released a video and responded quickly. And James went through, I think he went through one by one and he emailed everyone, which I appreciate that personal touch. Yeah. And then it’s a lot of work, trust me. But you know that the great irony is that I am not a spammer and I’m not going to add people’s emails to some like service list or whatever to give them to another service to entrust that in order to send out a mass email. So no, I’m gonna go and I’m gonna email every single person and however long it takes, I am actually still in the process of doing that, but it’s almost done.

So yeah, I mean that’s, it’s just really funny how a small group like a Corvette Report can have better digital ethics than some of these larger companies. Like Facebook didn’t even bother to notify anyone. It was just like, ah, it’s not in the public, they’ll know. So anyone can suffer a data breach. And so we have to get over trying to put the responsibility on other people. Right. We need to educate ourselves on personal cybersecurity. And this comes, you know, this is just about being conscious about the information you share online. A lot of it can be done by security and privacy, through a mission, by not having big tech apps on your phone or apps that are just demanding your user data.

And that’s what I do on take back or tech and with above is show people the software. So that does a lot of it, but it’s not, it’s not the title, it’s not the entire story. So sometimes you have to give your emails out because otherwise how are you going to listen to Solutions Watch? So I think, yeah, we’ll be showing some demos today on that. Yeah, you know, just to clarify, you don’t need to give me your email address to watch Solutions Watch. Everything I do is free, but if you want to support the work at some point.

Yeah, if you’re going to sign up to be a subscriber, you’re going to have to give up an email address. If you’re going to sign up for an email list, you’re going to have to give up an email address. So that brings us back to the question of what is an email alias and why and how might someone want to use one? Yeah, let’s start with why you might want to use one. So there’s three ways your email can get leaked on the world. One is you trust it with a third party and something happens and then it gets picked up by scrapers.

Because anyone who runs a website knows if they look at their logs constantly, there are people going through all their pages and looking for important tokens like emails. And then they email any of the emails they find like pretty much right away. So for instance, we have a abuse email and people are offering to 3D print us things on the abuse email. And it’s just like you’re abusing the abuse email. Gosh. And so once your email is out there, there’s no way to take it back. And so people need to be very careful when putting it on their profile or just sending it out online.

It can be sold in a second and then it’ll make its rounds through the dark web and even the surface web. The other thing that happens is just email etiquette. You might be on a giant CC thread and I’ve seen, I’ve been on a few CC threads with, with supposedly famous people on them. And that, that’s got to be annoying, right? That your email gets shared by someone else. And so then these other people have your email. This is why you always use the BCC blank carbon copy in your email. So email out of K, that’s important.

Lastly, is the unruly content creator who’s just sending out too many emails or it just makes it hard for you to unsubscribe. These three reasons are all reasons why you might want to use an email alias. So what is an email alias? Well, it is a way to create a alias that isn’t tied to your original email. So it’s another, you know, it’s. It’s an email that is completely different from your original email, but it will point to the first email. And that way if something happens to the alias, you can just shut it off. Just to give some background too, you know.

So the two solutions I’m going to show you today is I wasn’t taking the email thing actually very seriously with aliases until I had this happen to me. And I got spammed my inbox and I was worried for a few days, is it ever going to go away? But it went away after reporting it from spam a few times. We’ve got good spam filters in place, but I realized how important it was. And so doing my research on the best products out there, I found Anon Addie who’s a leader in the space. And I really liked their product so much we decided to build our own version of Anon Addie.

So we’re going to be showing you Anon Addie and then I will be showing you our solution, which we called Anon Mail. And it’s a part of above suite, which is our suite of privacy services, which is a lot more than just email. Can. Can I say Anon Male? Because Anon Male sounds weird to me. Anon Male. Anon Male. Is that, is that Like a Japanese thing. Well, I would say like anonymous. I don’t say anonymous. Anyway, whatever, I’m just joking. Yeah, a non anonymous, whatever way you want to pronounce it, it’s cool with me. So let’s talk about Anon Addie for Anon Addie First, I really, really like this company.

So this is a company that runs this email forwarding service. You could go to their website Addie IO a D Y IO. It’s open source software. It’s even self hostable. So anyone who has the email server or is about to run their own email server could run this as well. Their product is great, it’s pretty affordable and their privacy policy is very strong. So they’re, they’re doing a lot of things right. They have an A on their privacy report card. There’s only one gripe or critique I have which is that they use Cloudflare for the login and the register.

And you know, Cloudflare is on 40% of sites online. So. Hey, hey, Anon Addie. If you’re reading this, use, use something else. But they’ve got a really good product so I’m gonna give you an example of that. So if you can see my screen, I want to sign up for TakeBackerTech, which is my personal favorite source for tech news, TakeBackerTech.org But I don’t, I don’t want to give these guys, I don’t know if I trust these guys with my personal email. So what do we do? We could go to Addie IO. You’re going to sign up.

If you have an unusual domain for your email, it’s going to ask you to confirm that just by replying. Then you can go ahead and sign in. So go ahead and pause the video. Do that now and sign in and then you’ll get to this page. I’ve already created an account for myself. And then you go to aliases. Now this is pretty cool because you don’t even have to create an alias to start using it. You can actually just pick a, pick an email. So it could be tbotboven anonaddy.com as your email address and then it will automatically receive incoming mail and forward it to the original address.

Then you can also. That’s one way to do it. You could also create a unique random alias. So let me show you. Just use the creating aliases on the fly. So on the left hand side, I’m just gonna sign up here and I’m gonna use. Don’t give your name Hakeem. Use A don’t use your real name. Oh, no. Salt your data. You’re Fred, you’re Joe, you’re Sha. Shaqim. Shakim. There you go. They’ll never know. Exactly. All right. Okay. And then so I followed their format. Then I’m going to sign up. Cool. And now I’m going to load up my mail here.

So. Okay, so now notice this. So the email came in, but the from. They actually forwarded the from address. It doesn’t look like what it normally does, and I think they do that. So you can reply to it. But you’ll notice this badge on top just telling you that it’s forward. But you can go ahead and complete the signup. And now I’m successfully signed up to take back or tech. So it’s really that easy. Awesome. Okay, I have a question. In my. In my video that I did announcing the leak and talking about email aliases, I did say that, for example, if you’re signing up for a corporate report, you could create an address like corporate report Non Daddy Pio or whatever.

Right. And so then, you know, oh, it’s coming from corporate report. However, someone pointed out, and I think they might have some sense here, maybe don’t use the actual name or the domain or whatever of what you’re signing up to, because a smart spammer, and most spammers are not smart, they’re just sending out, you know, bot emails. But a smart spammer would be able to use that information for a sophisticated phishing attack. Oh, this is Corbett report. Oh, I see. So I could pretend to be James Corbett and I could try to engineer him into giving me a password or whatever.

Right. So maybe, maybe a sort of a random email might be better in that case. Right? Yeah. You know, that’s a good point. And I think that when you go in and you create your alias here, there is a way to put a description here. So maybe you don’t actually pick a word, which you notice here that you do need to pay in on Addie to get the custom addresses if you’re not doing it on the fly. But if you just want to pick one that’s random characters, put Corvette here. No one will be one the wiser.

Create it. There it is. And then this is the email we can use. I will just. Let’s see. Yeah. And so you could use this email in exactly the same way as I used it previously. Yep. So awesome. Yeah. Cool. All right. So that’s good. And how simple was that? I mean, it took two minutes. This is crazy. Yeah. That’s right. And you know what? What? I’m going to show you where the actually the thing we built is. I’m so confident in it. I’m going to sign myself up for a bunch of spam lists. We’ll be able to block it in real time.

Awesome. It’ll be pretty cool. So anon Addie, it’s really good stuff. I really appreciate these guys for pioneering the space. And check them out again. It’s open source. You can also pay with crypto, which I thought was really cool. So we credit them with our product as well. We modeled it quite similar to theirs. So ours is called Anon Mail. You can get it as part of our suite of software services. So it’ll just be bundled in to the different services we offer. Cryptid chat, Internet phone, vpn, email and calendar, file sharing, video conferencing, a search engine, knowledge and support.

A lot of stuff. All of that for $100 a year. So we’re going to release this in probably the next two weeks. We also have plans to make this open source which will be really cool for anyone who has a mail server that they want to run out of the box. And I’ll show you how it works. It’s very, very similar. So I already have set this up to use my login. Just going to log in here. Great. And we’re going to go ahead and do the same thing. We’re going to generate a random alias. We could also use a custom one.

And I’m going to call this one spam Me. Cool. So we get this new email address, Emerald Thunder 96 above. Im now in another tab that you can’t see, I’m gonna sign myself up for late night radio, UFO and conspiracy emails, funny cat and dog videos, wine tasting and van life and levitating free energy. That should be enough. Nice. Yeah, sounds like the typical stuff you’d receive from, you know, your aunt or something. Yeah, I love it. I would. I would not even call this stuff spam. This sounds great. All right, so. All right, so it appears to be running and in a second here, this is my account.

We should see some spam. Come in. Play the Jeopardy music while we wait. Make it so. Brock. All right, folks. Well, there you have it. Our email service can’t be spammed. What can I say? I really tried. I really tried. I signed up to about 40 different forms on the Internet now and not a single email. It’s just sad, really sad. What? What are the spammers coming to like? Come on guys. They’re just not doing their jobs. They’re just. They’re just being inefficient. Evidently. Anyway, people get the concept. But I have, I do have a question for you.

How about password management? I don’t know about anon Addie, but I know there are some email aliases where you have to sign up like each alias with its own password. If you want to actually send email from that alias, which sometimes you do want to do because you need to confirm who you are or whatever to whatever service you’re signing up to. What do you use for password management? Yeah, it’s a really good question. This is another thing where if you trust your password to a third party provider and they get breached which happened with was it one pass lastpass? I don’t remember.

But it’s pretty dangerous to give all your passwords up to someone like that. So what I tend to do is I do all my password management locally and I’ll show you what I use. So it actually comes pre installed on the abovebook and it’s this password manager called Keepass. Come on, guys. And what you can do is you can create a new database. So let’s call this a Corvette report. DB and in here you can actually set one master password. So this, this is the holy grail of all your passwords. It’s a password that protects all the other passwords.

You really want to be careful with this. I 10 to never. I don’t even write it down. I don’t ever put it online. It’s just I typically pick a very, very long sentence. So let’s pick. I want to hear Jeopardy. Guitar solo. Makes it even more difficult that you spell Jeopardy. Wrong, but okay. Whoa. I wasn’t an English major, James. You know what? Maybe I’m spelling it now. I gotta. Now I gotta. Oh man, I gotta look it up. Let’s jet. Je. Jeopardy. Jeopardy. You know what I mean? Jeopardy. Sorry, I’ve spoiled your perfect system here.

And so, yeah, and you can play around with this guys. But I really recommend to make it human readable. Also the first thing I do. Oh, that’s not a weak password. Get out of here. Then you get a file. And so this file is also, it’s also very, very valuable. So I can save it. I’ll save it in my documents here. And for now I have this password database. It’s going to load up and I will actually demo this. Maybe if I have, you know, I’ll do it the old fashioned way. We won’t do it. We won’t integrate it with the browser, but let’s go ahead and create a new account.

So for instance, by signing up to the corvettereport.com I could just use one of my anonymous email addresses. I’m putting my master password in here so you guys can see. So there’s a username and then what I love is this password generator, which is really, really cool. And so I try to never remember a password. I really don’t remember any passwords. I just remember the one master password and then I let this do the work. So you can pick a passphrase which are. These are just better all around. They are easier to remember, they’re easier to type in.

God forbid you have to type in a pass word on a phone. It’s terrible. Look at that. Can even do extended ascii, which just gets crazy. But so you can pick your separator. I’ll use an capitalize some random things in there, add a number. It’s also, you’re gonna notice that when you try and use giant passwords online, there’s sometimes there’s limits. I don’t know why there’s limits. Sometimes they have it, but anyways, you apply it. And you can also integrate Keepass XC in the browser. I actually have an article on Take Back our tech about it.

It’s called the Open Source Survival Library where I talk about it. And you can set a website here. So now you have this. And whenever you go to a website and you have it integrated, you can easily find it here and you can log in. So it makes it really, really easy. It’s just a file on your computer now. You might say, but I want my password synced. I totally get you. I totally get you. But this is where you could use other software like syncthing, which will create a peer to peer connection between your computers.

It’s a little bit more setup. You can also alternatively just copy the file over using a USB drive. Just be, just be careful with it. And don’t forget your master password. Typically, if I create a new one of these, I’m practicing the password like a lot that first day. And yeah, so that’s how I manage my passwords. Excellent. Very good response. I want to hear the Jeopardy guitar solo. And now I know your master password. Don’t you dare hack me. You mentioned the above book and oh, I just happen to have one here that you were kind enough to send to me and I appreciate that.

So I can attest to the fact that it, it works, it functions, it’s got A lot of inbuilt interesting stuff in there. You also talk about the above suite. So tell people who don’t know about Above Agency what you guys do, what people can get. Yeah, absolutely. So we have been around for four years and we are a Privacy first company, a Privacy and Freedom first company. So we’re working on devices and software that don’t track you. We have our own data center in the US where we run different communication services and we also design our own phone and laptop solutions which make zero connections to big tech.

So that’s our promise to people, hey, let’s cut out the big cheese. Let’s cut out Google and Apple, let’s cut out all the big tech companies and that’s really doing 80% of the work. So it’s a big step ahead on your journey. Now people might think, well, I’m kind of scared of using Linux. Well, you shouldn’t be because the ecosystem has really matured over the past few years and it’s a delight to use at this point. Every time I bring someone on to Abovebook, they start to tell me, wow, I start looking forward to using Linux more than I do my Windows laptop.

And yeah, so we’ve got the laptop. We also have the phone, which is a de Googled phone, which I think we’ve talked about previously. But you can go to our website@abovephone.com and James, yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts on the laptop once you have more time to dig around with it. But what we’re really proud of is that we made a laptop that you don’t need to use a terminal. So it’s really good for people who are maybe new to tech. And the phone will work with any cell service. It will. You can still download the majority of the apps you need to use.

And the beautiful part is it’s the phone and the laptop integrates together, which is great. So for instance, if you signed up for an Internet phone number with Above Suite, you could actually start texting people on your computer, which is really, really cool. And you can also do things like video conferences. So our goal with all this technology is to create a place where counter economists can communicate without being afraid to exchange or just to share their voice. And so we’re building a set of business tools so people don’t have to rely on things like Google Suite.

So we’re really excited to share this with you. And one of the things too that’s really important to us is our support shop. There is a support support plans here we are which we just released this recently, but we tend to do our best in support. So if you ever buy a device from us, you get a free Kickstart call. You also get 20. I shouldn’t say that. You get nine to five chat support and email support during the days Monday through Friday, you get access to our resources guides and webinars that I do every month.

And then we also started doing quarterly community calls, so. And it’s such a beautiful community that we have people all over the world just like yourself, who care about privacy and want to use this tech for the better. So, yes, with every device purchase, you get a free call. We’re here to help you. Excellent. So the best place is above phone.com. abovephone.com. That’s right. And takebackourtech.org Am I right? Takebackourtech.org yes. And then we just created this sub stack and I report on a lot of different things. My latest story was on the 51 narrow attack. Yes.

No, I was reading that. It’s. Yeah, an interesting story. I hope people have their eye on it. Yes. The game is really changing. It’s. I mean, the show just writes itself. It’s. It’s the first weekly show I’ve ever done. I’m really excited to be doing it. So if you’re interested in solutions and positive tech news on top of a lot of doom, like being objective about the doom that is out there, then check it out. That’s tbot.substack.com awesome. Hakeem, thank you for doing what you do. You are so welcome. Now let’s see if I got any spam.

Still no spam. Alright, guys, I. I declare victory against the spammers. This is actually. I know what this is. I know what this is. If you start to use an email alias, they can sense it and they’re just like, whoa, we’re not gonna touch this guy. So not an actual guarantee. James, thanks so much for having me. Blessings. All right, everyone. That was Hakeem Anwar. There he goes. And I hope that people who do take up this challenge and this task will report back with their own experience of doing it. Or if there are other people who already use email at aliases who have their own preferred methods or.

Or services, please do let us know. This is the point of solutions Watch. Generally, let alone a specific problem like this, yes, bad things do happen. I take them seriously. I will do my best to make sure this does not happen again. But in the meantime, let us use this problem as a teachable moment. Let us find the silver lining in this dark cloud and hopefully update our practices so that they are more secure. That is the point of all this, right? Well, hopefully. And on that very note, I got this. I have received quite a few emails of people saying, you know, thank you for being forthright about this, stuff happens, we’ll move forward, it’s okay, don’t beat yourself up about it, I trust you with my data, etc.

Well, I think the point of a problem like this is that we really. Even if you do trust a person with their data, your data, it doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be some problem in the big link. The chain of linkages, the thousands of things that can go wrong, something can go wrong and maybe will, and we should be prepared for that in the best ways we can. Email aliases is one example of that. But I got one specific testimonial from someone who was using email aliases and thus was able to identify the problem and let me know about it in those hectic few days where I was trying to figure out what exactly had gone wrong.

And so I’d like to share that message with you because I think it is, I think it’s an empowering message. So this person writes, I very rarely get spam, play stupid games, win stupid prizes, you know the drill. Therefore I protect my data because that’s my responsibility and nobody else is going to do it for me. Not at the most basic level, not at the level of the individual user. When I saw that there was a spamish looking email sent to one of my email aliases, I knew something was amiss. That email address is unique to the person or business I created it for.

Only that person or business is supposed to even know that email address exists. Game on. I was even more surprised when I went to the dashboard and log of my email alias provider and started matching up senders with aliases. Corbitt, I’m getting spamish traffic thrown at the email address I made for that account. I just recently changed that email address so this has to be recent. I went to the contact form at the website and left a concise message and was contacted soon after. I don’t think I was the very first person to do this because James Being was being James giving pertinent information and asking pertinent questions.

Prompted by his questions. I looked farther back in my dashboard log and was able to send him a list of a dozen or more spammers addresses being initiated two days prior. Shortly after the leaky plugin was installed updated. As James mentioned in his video update, it was the Diligent. I’ve been called worse, but that word will suffice for the purposes of this communication among his subscribers who initiated the process of discovery? This subscriber I am not a computer person. I don’t know how it all works. I don’t write code and wouldn’t understand the difference between good code and random keystrokes if shown the two side by side.

How does such a person even know what an email alias is in the first place? Corbitt he did a Solutions Watch episode years back and valuing privacy like I do, I took the time to investigate. I saw the many benefits of doing this at such a low cost. Each time I set up an account I create a new alias address. If that data is breached, I can pinpoint who and when and just burn that address. If I’m unable to unsubscribe without giving away more personal information which does happen, I burn that address and never have to think about it again.

And did I mention that I very rarely get spam? Years later, many of JC’s Corbitt’s subscribers are using his suggestions along with their own intelligence and diligence to help him sort out this breach. I wonder how many of the other 46,000 websites can say the same. Thank you very much for that testimonial. That really is the point of all of this. I certainly hope that people understand this is not a spectator sport. This is hopefully a way of learning our way forward, all of us, myself included, and we are all learning and adapting and growing and hopefully applying what we know to our lives to make them slightly better.

And in this case hopefully avoiding the problem of the spammers and data leaks. If that can be done. It’s all to the good. Sometimes we have to have problems and mistakes to be able to grow forward. So that really is the ethos of solutions. Watch. My hat’s off to that particular subscriber and all the subscribers who do take this seriously and do start applying this and who do provide the feedback which I think is relevant. Your experiences with email aliases, etc Very much welcomed and invited in the comments of this episode. Having said that, I think we’re going to leave this exploration here today.

Thank you for your time and attention and happy travels in the digital realm. Until next time, James Corbett CorbettReport.com.
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