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Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

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Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#141

Post by eythian »

cjs_ac wrote: post #86
gerdesj wrote: post #13

Email is just like physical mail and thankfully just as endearingly human (sometimes). Once upon a time (1970/80s) I lived on and off in a mystic land called West Germany. Our postal addresses ended with incantations such as BFPO 40. Around 1985ish my granny send a Christmas card to us. I should note that she was at this time nearly seventy and sadly suffering from Parkinsons. She addressed the card, in rather crabbe…

Bill Bryson claimed to have received a letter addressed to ‘Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire’. I have some cousins who live in a small town in Australia where the houses have neither names nor numbers. You just address the envelope to ‘ , , ’, and it’s the postie’s responsibility to know where everyone lives. (‘Postie’ is the official job title in Australia Post because it’s gender-neutral.)

I lived in mildly rural NZ back in the day and it was the same, addresses were "name, street, RD# (rural delivery route number), town" and your mailbox had your name on the side (and a flag you could put up if you wanted mail collected.)

Some time roughly mid-nineties we got numbers but originally they were just for emergency services, only later were they also for post, but I seem to recall the whole rural delivery system may have changed somehow around then too.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#142

Post by picofarad »

gonzalohm wrote: post #134
greengreengrass wrote: post #119

I, too, get so frustrated by + addresses not working that I’ve configured my MDA to rewrite —- (double hyphen) to plus, and use this in spite on sites that dislike the + variant. I’ve made it impossible to /not/ host my own mail delivery infrastructure now if I want every address I’ve ever given out to still work. Although more recently I’ve moved to a catch all domain for throwaway, which is even better. It confuses…

How do you deal with sending emails? When I was self hosting my emails would be flagged by Gmail (or any other email providers) so I effectively only had a self hosted inbox, which sucks

Dont use a random IP to host? I use fastmail, even though they're trying to convince me that I need to pay ~$45 now instead of $5/year.

And they sent me an email explaining how grateful I should be, that I'm grandfathered in to being able to use my own domain on a "plan" they dont even offer., in a plan that didn't offer custom domains.

Well how'd I get all that then? I signed up for fastmail explicitly because $5/yr for custom domains.

Anyhow if you pay a host you're probably fine. Or find someone with an old /24 thats had a /31 or /32 unused for a long while, and no other black marks against the /24. And use that IP, set up demarc and all the other new email DNS stuff.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#143

Post by swampangel »

rock_artist wrote: post #95

> In that sense, it’s actually pretty surprising that so much of the world’s population wasn’t able to put their own name, in its native written form, in an email address until just 14 years ago. Maybe for some internal usages. but imagine someone from a country using different language and characters gives me a card with their email. It's now far less portable for me to use it. Those days, I surely could picture it…

> Maybe for some internal usages. but imagine someone from a country using different language and characters gives me a card with their email. It's now far less portable for me to use it. Those days, I surely could picture it and find the email most likely getting it right.

It would be more portable for use with their peers who speak the same language, rather than requiring that everyone they want to communicate with in their own language and alphabet understands a second alphabet just for the addressing scheme.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#144

Post by picofarad »

greengreengrass wrote: post #119

I, too, get so frustrated by + addresses not working that I’ve configured my MDA to rewrite —- (double hyphen) to plus, and use this in spite on sites that dislike the + variant. I’ve made it impossible to /not/ host my own mail delivery infrastructure now if I want every address I’ve ever given out to still work. Although more recently I’ve moved to a catch all domain for throwaway, which is even better. It confuses…

What's the most common thing you hear when you do this? Usually its nothing, but the second most common thing is: "no, sir, your email address."

It gives me the fuzzies every time to explain I own the domain, and every email address on it is mine.

Since I have it on my phone, I can usually receive the email that they send very quickly and prove that everything's working fine.

I am wondering how hard it is to do this again today with a new domain though.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#145

Post by greengreengrass »

gonzalohm wrote: post #134
greengreengrass wrote: post #119

I, too, get so frustrated by + addresses not working that I’ve configured my MDA to rewrite —- (double hyphen) to plus, and use this in spite on sites that dislike the + variant. I’ve made it impossible to /not/ host my own mail delivery infrastructure now if I want every address I’ve ever given out to still work. Although more recently I’ve moved to a catch all domain for throwaway, which is even better. It confuses…

How do you deal with sending emails? When I was self hosting my emails would be flagged by Gmail (or any other email providers) so I effectively only had a self hosted inbox, which sucks

My setup is more complicated than it needs to be for $reasons (I like playing with networking protocols, have my own v6 prefix and ASN etc. and my mail and other important personal services are hosted across multiple sites for redundancy), but any competent VPS host that offers you a static IP - coupled with some DKIM, SPF and DMARC configuration that will take an afternoon - should solve the problem. I rarely touch my home setup and it works fine; mail doesn’t go to reputation black holes and it’s been like this (literally) for decades. I invest in architectural tweaks and improvements perhaps every 5 years.

I do run similar infrastructure professionally for a living, which probably helps with getting it right first time. Competent VPS hosts care about IP reputation for mail; e.g. Hetzner only allows outbound port 25 for “trusted” customers, which somewhat helps with abuse reports. Some hosting providers may even let you relay via their own outbound hosts if you have a VPS with them, which simplifies the operational aspect.

I rarely need to send from the catch all address, but Postfix can easily be configured to allow my user to send from other addresses, and then it’s just a case of adding as an alias in your mail user agent.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#146

Post by picofarad »

scottmcmac wrote: post #128
kgwxd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as {their company name}@mydomain.com People are still doing that? To prevent spam? To "catch" the company leaking/selling your address? Now the spammers know they can likely use anything@domain, and it'll get to your eyeballs in some capacity. Also, companies have no shame anymore, they don't care if you know.

Yeah, I do the same, but without the catchall for exactly that reason. If I start getting spam, the e-mail gets disabled.

Smart, what server / service do you use?

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#147

Post by greengreengrass »

kgwxd wrote: post #123
greengreengrass wrote: post #119

I, too, get so frustrated by + addresses not working that I’ve configured my MDA to rewrite —- (double hyphen) to plus, and use this in spite on sites that dislike the + variant. I’ve made it impossible to /not/ host my own mail delivery infrastructure now if I want every address I’ve ever given out to still work. Although more recently I’ve moved to a catch all domain for throwaway, which is even better. It confuses…

> as {their company name}@mydomain.com People are still doing that? To prevent spam? To "catch" the company leaking/selling your address? Now the spammers know they can likely use anything@domain, and it'll get to your eyeballs in some capacity. Also, companies have no shame anymore, they don't care if you know.

I started doing it when so many sites had broken + aliasing stuff, which I use for filing mail to keep my inbox manageable and actionable, as it was easier to type than my double-hyphen hack described above.

I’m not concerned about the leaking as my address is out there anyway and Bayesian spam filtering is still decent enough, but as an aside, I have had two companies this year whose user databases must have been leaked on the basis of spam received at company-specific addresses. I reported it to their privacy people and pointed out it’s highly unlikely this “spam” originated as their (tiny company name) being chosen by chance by a spammer who figured out my catch all domain.

They never replied, and I probably should have followed up with the local information regulatory commission in each case. Hopefully, my note helped them identify they had a leak and to secure their systems.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#148

Post by mesrik »

davidw wrote: post #55

[Old man voice] Back in my day these kinds of articles loved pointing out that, well, the email address could be a UUCP address and that's a whole different parsing situation. Of course, even then in the mid 90ies, UUCP was not something one really encountered outside of "so you think you're going to parse an email address with regexp?!" articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing

Oh, and there were more than just UUCP bang paths.

IBM Memo, Novel Netware etc. groupware and such X.400 and routing those required also odd email conventions. VAX VMS addresses did have % left side routing in too.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#149

Post by garaetjjte »

kgwxd wrote: post #123
greengreengrass wrote: post #119

I, too, get so frustrated by + addresses not working that I’ve configured my MDA to rewrite —- (double hyphen) to plus, and use this in spite on sites that dislike the + variant. I’ve made it impossible to /not/ host my own mail delivery infrastructure now if I want every address I’ve ever given out to still work. Although more recently I’ve moved to a catch all domain for throwaway, which is even better. It confuses…

> as {their company name}@mydomain.com People are still doing that? To prevent spam? To "catch" the company leaking/selling your address? Now the spammers know they can likely use anything@domain, and it'll get to your eyeballs in some capacity. Also, companies have no shame anymore, they don't care if you know.

In practice they don't do that, apart from spamming few addresses like office@ or accounting@. If some address starts getting spam I reject everything sent to it. For addresses that are getting spam but needs to be public (like contact addresses on website) I do more aggressive filtering (eg. I noticed that enforcing that recipient is actually present in To/Cc header cuts down a lot of spam).

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#150

Post by cestith »

riddley wrote: post #42

I have a gmail address that at least three other people think is their address. I constantly get emails for the dumb stuff they sign up for. NONE of them ever have an "I didn't request this" link. I mean, I get it. That won't make them money, but oh man is it annoying.

I get these all the time. The most fun was probably when I was given and building layout, door at which to arrive, schedule, and security information to get into a pro sports arena for a game as an employee of some vendor. The least fun was probably when I ended up talking to some drug company’s general counsel about why it’s not okay to send information about a discount program for a specific drug that treats one specific disorder with a bunch of personal information about the patient to an unverified email address. I went on to explain how their tech staff could prevent that, and remind them of the fines and possible jail time involved with HIPAA and HITECH violations.
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