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Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

mailhero.io

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Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#83
post #82

A feature like this is automatically baked in to my Fastmail account. "myemail@mydomain.com" can become "banks@myemail.mydomain.com", and all that email automatically goes to a folder called "banks". https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html

You can do it with google apps too, but it's a little more difficult. Login into an account and setup an alias.

There is a limit to the number of aliases, but you can just create more accounts with aliases that forward to your email.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#84
post #54

Love the anecdotes at the bottom. I’ll add two of my own: - Sent myself a photo from a Southern Californian theme park that starts with "D" and ends with a fireworks show, using a custom email address: No third-party spam, but my god their "unsubscribe" links (NOT that I ever subscribed) just don’t work, I got a promotion for everything vaguely Disney-related for a year until I blocked the address completely. Whoops,…

The same happened to the address that I gave to the D-freemium file-syncing service... Never used that address anywhere else.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#85

This looks really good. I've just seen this message though when I verified my email address: "Do not give out your bare-naked mailhero address (xxx@mailhero.io). Always make sure you add something before the dot, otherwise you can't stop the mails from arriving!" If anyone from Mailhero is here - why don't you block the bare-naked emails? If this becomes popular then marketeers can just search for @mailhero.io addres…

Additionally, with Inbox one can flag stuff as lower priority or delay delivery of a bundle

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#86
post #49

With gmail, you can create a custom email for each service, like so: youremail+service@gmail.com Later on, if the service doesn't let you unsubscribe, or sells your email to other spammers, you can just set a filter to trash emails sent to youremail+service@gmail.com

With gmail, my process with unwanted emails is: 1) Locate and click the "Unsubscribe" link. Usually, that is it. 2) If there is no "Unsubscribe" link, or if it requires more than one subsequent click, then "Report Spam" 3) ... if I get an email after unsubscribing, "Report Spam" straight away

The "unsubscribe" link is just as likely to be malicous as any other link in an unwanted email. For this reason, I skip your set #1.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#87
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they be stripped? The traditional alias separator is a '+' (dijit+hackernews@google.com) and periods are part of email names, thus the address itself: (jan.harasym@google.com)

Well, I've gotten spam that had it stripped; the name was a bogus one that I gave out in combination with a specific dot-aliased address, but the address in the To: header was without the alias. I can't say how often it happens, but with major mail providers (including Google, IIRC) widely known to support arbitrary dot aliases for throwaway addressing, it seems like a reasonable ploy from the spammer's point of view…

Gmail explicitly ignores dots in email usernames[1].

1: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo...

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#88
post #62
post #54

Love the anecdotes at the bottom. I’ll add two of my own: - Sent myself a photo from a Southern Californian theme park that starts with "D" and ends with a fireworks show, using a custom email address: No third-party spam, but my god their "unsubscribe" links (NOT that I ever subscribed) just don’t work, I got a promotion for everything vaguely Disney-related for a year until I blocked the address completely. Whoops,…

> Signed up for a famous freemium file-syncing service whose name also starts with "D" using a custom email address, never used for anything else; that ended up in the hands of spammers. Wasn't just me then. I /know/ I never used that particular address for anything else as it was specific to the D___Box service. Yet within 2 months, started getting lots of spam on it. I don't recall that company getting data breache…

I’ve been working on the assumption that a massive breach did happen, but was never announced (perhaps not even discovered internally).

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#89

I used to use a service like this called endjunk.com. A few years ago it shut down without warning and I found I couldn't receive emails or update my username for several services. I tried rolling my own for a while, but it was painful to make sure my mail server was always up to date and patched. I also had issues with forwarded mail being marked as spam by my email provider. If this service becomes popular and star…

Yep. Well, that’s why I feel pretty good about using my own domains + Fastmail!

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#90
Two concerns:

What about 33Mail? Is this not the same thing with the tag shifted?

What if this becomes popular? Spammers can write a special case for @mailhero.io addresses that strips or changes the prefix. If you block those avenues, it just turns into a much easier password guessing game: the user has dozens of passwords, and they're all one common word, lowercase.

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