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Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

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Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuking the actual email was of limited benefit over time. For whatever reason I started to get spam on my real non-aliased email address and at that point it was all bets off. Shortly after I gave up on the tagged addresses I just moved to gmail.

> I started to get spam on my real non-aliased email address and at that point it was all bets off. Why is that? You can also nuke your non-aliased email address and just update your forwards.

Yeah but my non-aliased mail is adam@adam.gs

I have no idea how it happened but /shrug

I could change it, but, I don't really want to.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#162
post #57
post #31

I had to stop using plus-addressing (me+brand@gmail.com) because of broken email address parsers/validators. If I was on the phone with a support agent, I would give them my plus-address and their system would reject it and they'd ask for another one. Stubbornly, I'd refuse to budge and insist that is my email address that they need to use. It got to the point where I'd either have to forfeit my healthcare/tax/flight…

GMail has supported the "+" alias since the service was announced, one would think there'd be no excuse to not support it everywhere at this point. My consipiracy-theory hypothesis is that many companies "know" that any address with a + in it is an alias and actively filter it out. Because they don't want an alias, they want your _real_ address. I run my own mail server and use a "." as the alias character. Haven't s…

Because gmail allows periods, and many people think the period is required since that's how they signed up for it. Therefore many people consider a period an important part of an email address.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#163
Title says that using a catch all domain (whatever that is) is a mistake, but the bulk of the article about it being a mistake to use the other party's company name as the local part of a throwaway e-mail address which you use for communicating with that party. There is nothing about the catch all aspect being a mistake. You don't have to give a Hilton hotel an address like hilton@example.com; it could be bob-2022-05@example.com, right?

I use a throwaway e-mail system whose generated addresses look like this: 539-343-1293@example.com. The dashes can be replaced by underscores or periods: all are recognized, but not mixtures of them: basically three versions of the every alias is installed. (Why? I ran into a situation where I had to enter my e-mail address into a point-of-sale system that didn't accept dashes.)

There is no "catch all" mechanism at play. Each address is explicitly created, using a web-UI application that I wrote. The moment you create it, it goes live, as a local alias recognized by the mail server.

Each such address is associated with its creation date, and a memo field. If the memo field contains URL's, they get rendered into navigable form. They are editable. The memo field is what tells me who/what the address is associated with. I have a regex search box to filter the entries (quite a lot have accumulated).

The UI is like Web 1.5: you can checkbox these items and do bulk operations on them, like bulk delete, move to top, move to bottom and such.

When I delete an address, it immediately stops working. THAT is why "catch all" would be a bad idea; if you have a rule which routes any nonexistent local part to your inbox then you don't have any easy way to turn off an address which is being abused, other than going into the mail server rules and writing a rule to reject that address. That's not a fun UX, compared to a nice throwaway address management dashboard.

This system is called TAMARIND: Throw Away Mail Alias Randomization Is Not Defeatable. :) :)

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#164
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…

Agree. This also creates additional challenges for data brokers when trying to tie together datasets about you.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#165
I’ve been doing this for 25 years and am happy. I’ve had stuff happen like OP and it’s fine with me.

It also has fun abilities to give out email addresses to friends who don’t understand how email works and that’s kind of fun.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#167
What’s weird is I’ve noticed some sites and apps don’t like their name in the account name and won’t validate.

For example, I tried signing up for the Chronometer app using chronometer@prepend.com and can’t make it through their sign up process.

I’ve always wondered what kind of programmer makes their domain name as email not work. I’m guessing it’s some testing or debug shortcut but won’t have closure.

I’ve probably noticed 6 sites over the years like this.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#168
post #70

I had the exact same experience! Almost verbatim. Nowadays, after one very long weekend spent changing my email address across dozens of different websites and services, I just use name@name.red instead of anything service-specific. Even now, though, the fact that it's a ".red" rather than a ".com" is too much for some people (e.g., my student loan servicer doesn't support .red domains at all). It's fun being special…

Using a domain hack for my personal emails has caused me annoyance when dealing with any real people, similar to the .red tld for you.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#169
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…

> When I started with catch-all I was actually using mails like companyname@mydomain […]

I missed out on a dentist appointment because of this. They thought I was a robot. I blame gmail.

Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake

#170
post #3

reminds me a bit of the family member who owns firstname@lastname.com and can't get random non technical people to believe that their email address domain really is lastname.com "but don't you mean at gmail.co..." no

I've been using firstname@lastname.com for ages and this doesn't happen to me. Usually it's "huh that's neat", but I also have a very unique last name

I have had the same experience with first@last.me. My last name is also pretty unique.
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