I recently had my own experience of the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomena. The other day I read Karl Voit’s post from 2015 on having a separate (from) email address for each correspondent. It seemed a little odd to me. Why would I want to do that? Voit didn’t give a reason, he just said he liked to do it.
He uses Mutt as his email client and wrote a python script to interface with Mutt to automate the generation of unique from email addresses. Of course, for this to work you have to have your own domain to which you can add multiple email addresses.
But the question remains, why do this? Right after reading Voit’s post I saw this post from TyChi that provides a rationale for the practice. The post is a little rambling but the TL;DR is that it keeps companies and Web sites that you communicated with from using your email address as an identifier to tie your activities from different sites together to build a more complete dossier on you and your activities.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing and use, say, Mu4e in Emacs for your mail, it would, I’m sure, be reasonably easy to adapt Voit’s python script to Elisp and integrate it into Mu4e. The middle ground—that I use—is to generate special email addresses for sites that I don’t want spamming me. I do this by hand but an automated solution would be nice.