I use canaries. I point a dozen domains to fastmail and another dozen to my self hosted email servers. Each have aliases that are mapped to vendors but do not have the vendor name as some vendors are getting upset at this practice and calling it fraud. If I start getting garbage on that alias, I notify the vendor. In most cases they will give me a boiler plate response and then I delete the alias. If they are snarky I create a reject rule with my own snark that also explains the emails for that vendor have been either sold or compromised. This is to let people buying email addresses know they bought a dirty list as some of the modern bots have some telemetry.
Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
21–30 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#22I run my own IT. I host my own email, authoritative DNS, web, etc. I use wireguard for a lot of stuff. I put stuff behind cloudflare. I'm sneaky when I need to be, but mostly I'm just a control freak. I also know way more than the average person about email and email authentication. Or lack thereof.
Every entity gets it's own email address. As others have pointed out, it lets me track who ends up with it. Sometimes I find it surprising, mostly I don't. Sometimes, though, people are up to some shit.
edit to say that those actually creating mailboxes for everything should just use aliases that funnel to a single mailbox. So much easier to maintain than having to have a huge keepass db.
edit 2 employ dmarc if you want to see who is trying really game
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#23Yes every service gets a custom address. It's also interesting that some services don't allow COMPANYNAME@mydomain.com for registration. (Can't remember which)
Aliexpress. I log in there as express.ali@
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#24Yes. I use a catch-all. I can accept (whatever)@mydomain.tld Anytime a new company wants my email address, I just randomly give them one. So far I only get spam to the email addresses other people posted on a website as contacts for organizations I volunteer with. (I get spam from web scraping, not from company hacks/sharing etc.)
JW, why? Do you get so much spam from a specific email that you feel safe to ban it completely? Are you able to sue them or just send a strongly worded email about how they sold your email?
I do the exact same thing and I don't live in the US so suing a party that sells my shit isn't an option, but it's nice to be able to blackhole an alias so that the corporation in question doesn't get to bother me with their bullshit. It's only happened once or twice.
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#25for general purpose website signup not directly linked to my identity, I use Simplelogin. For real life personal stuff I just have a gmail. There is another dedicated email for open source work, plus a few historical email addresses which aren't actively used but still occasionally receives stuff.
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#26I do not. I have three mail boxes, for trashy, job-y and personal things. And a couple of technical (apple id, etc). Gmail is really good at filtering spam, so I probably looked into it and found a letter that I waited for only one time in last few years. My inboxes are either empty or may get first non-spam marketing emails that I unsubscribe from immediately. Unread count zero. Idk why people fortify their email th…
Same. I used to run my own email servers and do all the per domain things. It was just way too exhausting. Switched to Gmail and haven't looked back. Don't even worry about email at all now. I just wish I had jumped on Gmail earlier to have a better username.
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#27I use canaries. I point a dozen domains to fastmail and another dozen to my self hosted email servers. Each have aliases that are mapped to vendors but do not have the vendor name as some vendors are getting upset at this practice and calling it fraud . If I start getting garbage on that alias, I notify the vendor. In most cases they will give me a boiler plate response and then I delete the alias. If they are snarky…
woah, what do you mean by calling it fraud? Have you actually had companies come after you legally due to an email alias?
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#28Yes. I use a catch-all. I can accept (whatever)@mydomain.tld Anytime a new company wants my email address, I just randomly give them one. So far I only get spam to the email addresses other people posted on a website as contacts for organizations I volunteer with. (I get spam from web scraping, not from company hacks/sharing etc.)
JW, why? Do you get so much spam from a specific email that you feel safe to ban it completely? Are you able to sue them or just send a strongly worded email about how they sold your email?
I also do this. There are some bad sellers that keep my email address and create a new email list for every promotion, so the Unsubscribe link in their emails always says something like “Unsubscribed from Promotion-2024-October” instead of “Unsubscribed from AnnoyingSeller”. Those get sinkholed.
I also once helped a seller discover that their contractor had stolen and resold their customer contact list when I started getting unrelated spam at that address and complained lol
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#29Occasional use of plus addressing but I find a lot of signup forms now actively block this. Also have a secondary crappy gmail address that I use for low value stuff that is sus. (That’s full of spam and has multiple hits on have I been pwned)
Beyond that I don’t worry about this too much.
As a side note - amazed that iPhone autocorrect corrected my “owned” to pwned in above
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#30I use Proton's email aliases for throwaway accounts, and I have a catch-all on my own domain and use custom email addresses (think apple.com-randomstring@example.com) for accounts that I intend to keep until I die.