Saving addresses
Storage sounds like the boring part and it decides how often you end up somewhere wrong.
The property that matters
You want a store that is under your control, that you can date, and that you will actually prune. Convenience matters less than it seems, because the number of times you need an address is small and the cost of pulling a stale one is large.
| Where | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Password manager entry | Good | Under your control, easy to date, easy to edit, and encrypted at rest |
| A text file you own | Good | Same benefits, plus you can add notes about where each came from |
| Paper | Good | Cannot be edited by anything running on your machine, which is the one attack the others share |
| Browser bookmark | Poor | Often synced to an account, easy to click without thinking, and it hides the address behind a title |
| A message to yourself | Poor | Lives on somebody else's service and mixes with everything else you send |
| Memory | Bad | Nobody remembers fifty six characters, and near enough is exactly the failure being exploited |
Write down where it came from
This is the habit almost nobody has and it costs one line. Next to each address, note the source and the date you got it. Later, when you are deciding whether to trust something you saved eight months ago, the note answers the question that otherwise has no answer.
It also makes the source grades actionable. An address noted as pulled from a directory in March reads differently from one noted as verified on arrival in July, and without the note both look identical.
Pruning is the important half
Saving new addresses is easy and everyone does it. Deleting old ones is what actually protects you, because a retired address kept around is the exact thing that gets recycled by somebody else.
- Compare what you hold against the current roster every few weeks. This takes under a minute and it is the whole maintenance burden.
- Delete anything no longer listed. Do not move it to an archive section, do not keep it in case, delete it.
- Update the date on anything you confirmed, so the note stays meaningful.
- If something you hold has vanished from the roster and you are not sure, treat it as gone. Being wrong in that direction costs you nothing.
What not to save
Credentials in the same place as addresses, which turns one compromise into two. Anything that identifies which platform the addresses belong to, if the store is somewhere that might be read by someone else. And screenshots, which end up in photo libraries that sync, get backed up, and get indexed by software that reads text in images.