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Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

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Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

#101

Post by throwaway67743 »

This happens time and time again, enumeration, outright breaches etc - I've used aliases for as long as I can remember (2 decades maybe) and it's always the people you least expect - probably the most annoying one is where an azure specific alias was somehow enumerated and gets nonsense daily, mailgun also had an unacknowledged problem where you could enumerate domains during verification.

These days I'm moving to a completely randomized not human memorable model, because often the obvious aliases are also tried.

Incidentally I don't think I've ever had aliases shared they're typically just harvested as part of breaches or incompetence.

Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

#103

Post by tolmasky »

Do any password managers support you having your own email domain and automatically creating an email address when you create a new account (ideally not just using the company’s name but something random perhaps to not give this away)? Like in a sign up form it could generate “helloworld99@domain.com” as well as a password.

Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

#104

Post by [deleted] »

LinuxBender wrote: post #36

Is the fear of "people selling your email to spammers" a modern myth, or are spam filters that good? Email databases for sale are not always for spam or malware. They are often used for tracking and cross marketing calculations. Placing a companies name in the address will signal a canary and they may likely filter your contact out of their database or at least flag it and treat it differently. I've been using email…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

#105

Post by bennyp101 »

I’ve noticed the same, I wonder if they filter out emails that contain the company name when selling lists?

I do often get asked if I work for said company when giving it in person or over the phone, and I just say it’s so I know if it gets sold or leaked I know where it came from.

I seem to remember a few years ago I couldn’t sign up to a service with the company name in the email, but that’s the only time I came across that.

Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

#106

Post by withzombies »

I wrote a blog post[1] about my experiences with custom usernames and how I regret it. It was previously covered on HN here[2].

I came to the same conclusion as you, but additionally decided it has been a major waste of time and I'm slowly trying to undo it

[1] https://www.notcheckmark.com/2022/06/catch-all-domain/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31585463

Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

#107

Post by throwaway67743 »

tolmasky wrote: post #103

Do any password managers support you having your own email domain and automatically creating an email address when you create a new account (ideally not just using the company’s name but something random perhaps to not give this away)? Like in a sign up form it could generate “helloworld99@domain.com” as well as a password.

This is a good idea and something I've been looking into, it should be easy enough to do but I'm not sure you can hook things like auto fill in browsers and I'd imagine it could be easily abused (that is, trigger on another extensions auto fill)

I actually have a service in the works that has a simple API to create aliases etc, with hosted imap though not forwarding because forwarding is stupid. The main issue though is by itself it's not useful, it needs browser integration etc

Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

#108

Post by rotten »

LinuxBender wrote: post #36

Is the fear of "people selling your email to spammers" a modern myth, or are spam filters that good? Email databases for sale are not always for spam or malware. They are often used for tracking and cross marketing calculations. Placing a companies name in the address will signal a canary and they may likely filter your contact out of their database or at least flag it and treat it differently. I've been using email…

Fastmail offers a masked email feature for one-time email addresses: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...

Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

#109

Post by IanNorris »

I've been doing this for about 5 years. So far none of my company specific email addresses have been leaked, but it has let me black hole some emails (eg Intel) because their unsubscribe systems are broken.

I wish I'd been more aggressive at switching to it as the one account I got the most spam from was Kickstarter when they got compromised. I'd say 70% of all my spam came from that one breach. That unfortunately was an email address I can't burn.

I use SimpleLogin.io now after hand rolling a solution for a few years after I saw it linked from a HN post. The caveat is that my family members that hang off one of my domains struggle to understand it, despite them only seeing the personal Gmail account I created to receive their email to.

Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

#110

Post by kwanbix »

IanNorris wrote: post #109

I've been doing this for about 5 years. So far none of my company specific email addresses have been leaked, but it has let me black hole some emails (eg Intel) because their unsubscribe systems are broken. I wish I'd been more aggressive at switching to it as the one account I got the most spam from was Kickstarter when they got compromised. I'd say 70% of all my spam came from that one breach. That unfortunately wa…

I also do this and my emails appeared on DB breaches so I got spam there.
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