Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

notcheckmark.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 304 posts

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#131

Post by gaudat »

ntoskrnl wrote: post #122
gaudat wrote: post #117

Cringe take, but fair enough on the bank freaking out part. My interaction with them went like this: >staff: And what's your email address? >me: $BANK_NAME@$MY_DOMAIN >staff: chuckles And on the next day I got my bank account flagged. Edit: Turns out the restriction was not related to the email address. It was a red Canadian bank. I would say large banks like Citibank, DBS or HSBC would never care to this since all e…

Which bank was it?

I just returned from the bank. Turns out the restriction was not related to the email address.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#132

Post by BryanA »

I don't use a catch-all domain, but do use custom tagging. I started-out tagging email with the '+' character, but a lot of places just reject that character; so I started using '0' instead. If you're running your own domain and use postfix, it's not difficult to setup a user-regex which will reject any email without a valid user prefix e.g. Joe0anything@mydomain.com works, but mailbot@mydomain.com is rejected. I've been using this for about ten years now and have had to blacklist about 50 email addresses. I agree it's awkward when you're telling a store clerk or phone support person your email address, but I've found that they either think it's funny or just don't care enough to even comment.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#133

Post by prawn »

stickfigure wrote: post #68

For weeks our Shopify app was getting rejected because "you cannot use the Shopify name or trademark in your app". It wasn't... repeated requests for clarification just got back the same form response. After a several frustrating back-and-forths, finally someone at Shopify said "check your email address". The developer contact email address we had submitted, which was only used for shopify us communication and no cus…

You'd think anyone competent in tech would instantly recognise that for what it was. Using an email like that for a specific purpose shouldn't be that uncommon. And they should recognise that it was an internal address. Crazy.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#134

Post by Animats »

I used to have one of my domains configured to accept all mail, after spam filtering. The result was amusing. I had the domain in .com, and a school in the UK had the same domain name in .co.uk. So I'd get some misaddressed mail, usually at the beginning of the school term. Not that much.

One day I got a message "I am going to kill you tonight". It was from someone at the school, intended for someone else at the school. I wasn't sure what to do, especially since it was the middle of the night in the UK. Call the cops in the UK? Finally I found an emergency number on the school's web site, and ended up reaching the headmistress. She was at first annoyed at being awakened. Then she was fully awake and annoyed. Once she heard the name of the sender, she said "He's only 12". Some kid was in for a major chewing out, but the situation did not require police.

If that had happened in the US, there would be a SWAT team callout.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#135

Post by kodah »

> The truth is no one really sells your email – at least no legitimate companies. The one outlier is political campaigns: they'll share your email till the end of time. No matter what I do I can't get bernie@ purged from any lists. Every level of government has that email and they share it as widely as they can. I'm pretty sure I only gave him $20 a decade ago.

Interestingly, when I was in Texas this never happened. I voted, I attended rallies, etc... The Democratic and Libertarian parties there just never sold my information; moreover, they never added me to lists or texting campaigns.

Then, I moved to California and the flood gates opened. I was getting back to back text messages from "campaign organizers". Later, I found out these are just normal people texting me from a burner phone because I angrily replied to one of the texts. Why, in this day and age, the Democratic party would entrust my name and phone number (and who knows what else) to some random "volunteer" or "advocate" is beyond me. You don't need to spend more than five minutes on the internet to understand many people who use that title do so with misaligned intentions.

Nowadays, I report their numbers to Google and they automatically go to spam.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#136

Post by inetknght »

dzek69 wrote: post #120

I'm using catch all since forever. I regret nothing. Two stories: I don't use mails like facebook@domain uber@domain - that's too obvious. And knowing that may often disclose that I actually have an account registered on given page. I don't want that, so I go full random, using few words I have in mind, current few words from the song I'm listening too, etc. So password manager helps me with e-mails too. But Sometime…

> I don't really know exactly, but she told me something about me using their stuff without their acceptance, when I tried to explain that's my own domain she told me I cannot use their name, because that's a copyright infringement. Weird.

I can't tell you how many non-techy people think I'm part of their company because I have yourcompany@mydomain. Sigh. Big companies have ruined the internet by having everyone have @gmail or @hotmail or something.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#137

Post by couchand »

C4K3 wrote: post #11

I've been doing this for close to a decade and sometimes salespeople and customer service people will ask to confirm, but that takes 5 seconds and isn't awkward (in my opinion.) It has more benefits than knowing who leaked your email, it lets you easily filter your incoming email by who you gave the email to, and when your email is leaked it lets you shut off that email address. Of course you can also filter your ema…

> you do have to set it up so that you can send email from the addresses

Fastmail's webmail allows you to specify the sending email address for a catch-all mailbox in the message composition page, so there is no additional setup there.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#139

Post by jmbwell »

I would add that once you start using catch-all, you are forever limited to self-hosting or using an email provider that supports it, unless and until you want to leave behind all the individual addresses or go around updating your info everywhere.

I did catch-all for decades. I honestly wasn’t getting any benefit from it that I couldn’t get in some other way, better.

It doesn’t solve spam, so I still need anti-spam tools. Spam still comes to my main address anyway, so it doesn’t keep spam out of that account. Smart mailboxes give me more powerful tools for organizing things according to more refined criteria than just “to.” Knowing when sites leak my address isn’t especially valuable to me personally. In the end, the address I give out is sort of irrelevant. I may as well just be using my main address for everything. Which is what I’ve started doing.

Yet I’m still saddled with all these catch-all-dependent email addresses. I have a huge Swiss-cheese email perimeter, more or less forever.

It won’t be easy or fun to unwind all that, and I’m not sure I’d ever be able to do so completely. It’s the worst of both worlds.

If I could go back in time, I would tell myself the only way to win is not to play.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#140

Post by zarzavat »

kennywinker wrote: post #102
encryptluks2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note some services won't even recognize a subdomain email address as valid.

Really? Wouldn't that catch people with `.co.uk` or similar localized domains?

They use a regex such as /[a-z]+(\.[a-z]{2,3}){1,2}/

There’s a lot of bad email validation regexes floating around on the internet. If it’s an older service it may have been written before gTLDs.

Post reply on HN