121–130 of 212 posts
I've had a catch-all for *@mydomain.com forward to my primary email address for 10+ years. In that time I signed up for services and websites with [domain]@mydomain.com thinking I'd catch all those dirty scoundrels selling my email address and have an easy way to filter unwanted mail. But you know what really happened? I wound up with hard to remember email logins and caught less than a handful of services sharing my…
with gmail you can do something similar without all that hassle. lets say your email is johndoe@gmail.com you can register any email as johndoe+whatever@gmail.com and Gmail will always ignore the + and route to your johndoe@gmail.com address.
I've had a catch-all for *@mydomain.com forward to my primary email address for 10+ years. In that time I signed up for services and websites with [domain]@mydomain.com thinking I'd catch all those dirty scoundrels selling my email address and have an easy way to filter unwanted mail. But you know what really happened? I wound up with hard to remember email logins and caught less than a handful of services sharing my…
with gmail you can do something similar without all that hassle. lets say your email is johndoe@gmail.com you can register any email as johndoe+whatever@gmail.com and Gmail will always ignore the + and route to your johndoe@gmail.com address.
I've had a catch-all for *@mydomain.com forward to my primary email address for 10+ years. In that time I signed up for services and websites with [domain]@mydomain.com thinking I'd catch all those dirty scoundrels selling my email address and have an easy way to filter unwanted mail. But you know what really happened? I wound up with hard to remember email logins and caught less than a handful of services sharing my…
1. You need to have multiple domains. If your solution is just one host name and your service becomes popular, it will become blacklisted in a matter of months.
2. The volume of spam you'll receive is huge. Really huge. Even if your service is only moderately successful. It costs money to keep such a service running.
As an alternative, you could register a domain with a catch-all email address and simply register for new services on the fly using a unique string for each site. Have the catch-all forward to your main email account. For example, I would sign-up for HN using hackernews@marak.com and for Reddit using reddit@marak.com Simple and effective.
Been there done that. If you catch all e-mail you will also get a lot of spam to random addresses like say sven@marak.com, lollerskates95@marak.com and so on and so forth. So then you need spam filtering anyway, or you need to configure which addresses are valid. I still host my own e-mail but I no longer do catch-all. There are only a few sites and services I care about. For those I have trusted them with my e-mail…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a Gmail specific thing. That's something you can do with email in general.
I believe it is Gmail specific. Cursory search reveals that sendmail does that too, but I don't think it is specified in RFC. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
With qmail the "standard"[1] was username-alias@example.com, rather than username+alias@example.com. I rather prefer that - but then my (user)name(s) don't contain any hyphens.
Either way I think it looks better with system usernames - firstname.lastname@example.com was/is usually handled as a separate form of alias look-up anyway.
[1] http://www.lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html#dot-qmail-files See section "4.1.5. extension addresses"
[ed: and I recall using tmda as an anti-spam system - it inserts an encrypted tag in the alias portion, that can be stamped with an expiry date, and tied to a sender address (eg hmac(userkey, sender@example.com+01012018) => xyxyzzzzz - give sender@example.com the address user-xyxyzzzz@example.net - and mail to that address will be accepted from only sender@example.com until 1/1/2018.
As an alternative, you could register a domain with a catch-all email address and simply register for new services on the fly using a unique string for each site. Have the catch-all forward to your main email account. For example, I would sign-up for HN using hackernews@marak.com and for Reddit using reddit@marak.com Simple and effective.
I've been doing this for years. It's fascinating (and sometimes horrifying) which addresses end up on spam/scam lists. I used to inform companies when it happened, but they almost always go for plausible deniability with "spammers try random addresses at a domain sometimes, it must have been that".
I've had a catch-all for *@mydomain.com forward to my primary email address for 10+ years. In that time I signed up for services and websites with [domain]@mydomain.com thinking I'd catch all those dirty scoundrels selling my email address and have an easy way to filter unwanted mail. But you know what really happened? I wound up with hard to remember email logins and caught less than a handful of services sharing my…