No, I absolutely could not care less. Its baffling to me why people do. There's nothing you can do about it, anyway.
Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
81–90 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#82I used to, but it basically showed that no one ever gave away my email address to spammers, or at least if they did, the spam filter caught it. It's not worth it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#83I have a public address and a private address. Gmail does well enough with spam filtering. I check it monthly and find some false positives. Nothing important though.
I can’t imagine spending more time on this, though.
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Samsung does this for example! You can't register a Samsung account if your email contains the word "Samsung"...
I think this might be a lazy attempt to protect users from scammers trying to impersonate the company. There are people that will read an email from "SamsungCeo@gmail.com" and think it's actually from the owner of the company...
I would venture a guess that there is an equal proportion of company executives who would think that creating and using an email address like 'CompanyCeo@gmail.com' was completely fine - an awareness of internet scams is not correlated with business acumen!
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#85I use iCloud’s Hide my Email feature. So I have dozen email addresses and I receive email in the same inbox. I don’t care how my email addresses are used. The moment I see too much spam, I remove the email address.
I love this feature in Apple’s ecosystem so much. The newer iOS and iPadOS releases when autofilling a sign-up form even give an option to generate a new hide my email address. It’s effortless to not use your real email. If you pay for an iCloud subscription, hide my email is included. Apple tracks what site you used hide my email on when signing up and allows you to toggle forwarding of emails to your inbox on and off.
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#86I self-host so that I can set the addresses to whatever I want it to be. I use the ISP's server for sending and my own server for receiving (this can be configured with Exim).
Then, if I receive some spam messages, I can delete an alias that I don't want, in order to avoid receiving any messages.
(When someone sends to an invalid alias, the SMTP server gives them a 550 error.)
(I use Heirloom-mailx for reading, managing, and sending email messages.)
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#87Fastmail let's you set a wildcard when you bring your own domain. Same outcome as other's mention - usernamespotify@domain.com is my spotify email address. I make it up during login creation and it just works. I've used this technique for every login but not once has it resulted in traceable spam. Logins are all tracked in keepass.
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#88I used to use a catch-all with a custom e-mail for every website I used. I had amazon@mydomain, newegg@mydomain, etc. I found that despite what people think, your e-mail address isn't being sold. At least, not by any vendors with a remotely decent reputation. I never got spam to any of those e-mail addresses.
I ran a catch-all for two decades, including during my IBEW apprenticeship. They were unabashed on sending their own (and others') SPAM daily – direct-to-trash.
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
woah, what do you mean by calling it fraud? Have you actually had companies come after you legally due to an email alias?
I'm not GP, but I've had transitions denied while attempting to purchase something because the retailer's code flagged my email address as suspicious because it contained their name in it.
Linode did this to me.
Re: Ask HN: Do you track how your email address is used?
#90Fastmail let's you set a wildcard when you bring your own domain. Same outcome as other's mention - usernamespotify@domain.com is my spotify email address. I make it up during login creation and it just works. I've used this technique for every login but not once has it resulted in traceable spam. Logins are all tracked in keepass.
This one time a restaurant owner was demanding email addresses when creating a reservation. I provided the email created using the above technique and explained why.
"if I create an account with Target called target@domain.com and I start seeing emails from Walmart sent to target@ then I know Target sold my data."
His eyes got really big and he changed the subject.