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Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

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Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#191

Post by f_fmail »

picofarad wrote: post #142
gonzalohm wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I migrated from Fastmail to Runbox in 2017, having been a customer with the former for four years, after I filed a ticket and the Fastmail CEO responded with such obnoxious belligerence that I swore off doing business with Bron or his company ever again.

The ticket began with a question about whether they'd be willing to change the way their WebDAV server handles query strings (by just ignoring them—versus returning 404, as it was doing at the time). The CEO subtly reframed the conversation as if I was accusing them of not following the standards. I wasn't. Git utterly screwed up how it does content negotiation. The change on their end would have made it easier to upload content into the file storage/web hosting space included with all plans[1] using git instead of a dedicated, conventional WebDAV client or the flaky support built into nautilus. I explained that I had originally planned to write a blog post about another one of the benefits of a Fastmail account, but the smugness and passive aggression of Bron's subsequent response—"Oh good. We don't want that," and his likening the use of git to push your static site to Fastmail's web hosting as akin to abusing DNS to tunnel arbitrary IPv4 data (wat)—and the general intellectual dishonesty I'd run into over the years seeing them respond to criticism e.g. here on HN, along with the fact that my plan was up for renewal in a month made the choice not to renew (and to try to dissuade others from giving their money to jerks) an easy one.

I switched to a different provider the next month, ended up saving money, and have only ever been met with warmth and kindness in the interactions I've had since switching, which is now going on 10 years ago.

1. https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060590933-How...>

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#192

Post by f_fmail »

rmunn wrote: post #26
farfatched wrote: post #10

> It’s likely that more people out there are being filtered by badly-implemented form validation than there are being filtered by their own need of hand-holding. I wish this was asserted with evidence. The author might suggest this because they have unrealistic views of some users. > In the year of our lord 2026, you can reasonably expect your users to know how to type their own email address - or even better, auto-i…

> I have multiple family members who have healthy memory, but can't accurately remember their email address everytime: the localpart, the domain, the syntax, everything. I got Gmail early enough that I have (my first name) dot (my last name) at gmail dot com. About twenty years ago, I started getting strange emails. At first I thought they were spam, because they were addressed to me by name but I had never joined th…

> my name doppelganger must have registered firstnamelastname@yahoo.com, and then forgot the domain

Alternative explanation: A hastily scribbled "@ymail.com" (along with its relative infrequency) can look to many people like "@gmail.com".

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#193

Post by f_fmail »

Joker_vD wrote: post #57
christophilus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I just validate that it has an @ and then let it through. The actual sender (mailgun, or whatever) can do the dirty work for me.

\.{1,100}@\.{1,100} I'd probably also have a red warning line under the input field for something really fishy and also most common typos (like "gmail.con") but other than that, I'd let it through.

exists for a reason.

You shouldn't be going through extra effort to get things wrong. Just use the thing that you're supposed to use.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#194

Post by rock_artist »

mitxela wrote: post #139
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…

What if the agreed upon international standard alphabet didn't happen to be the one you natively write with? If the world agreed to write all email addresses in katakana, that would work just as well as ASCII, right? I have to ask this because a lot of people confuse "single international character set" with "single international character set that happens to be my one." If you'd also be okay with katakana, then you'…

English nor Latin characters are my native language. My language is also written from right-to-left.

So if it was broadly used and what charset used by a reasonable amount of the population then yeah I’d of course learn it in early age as I had to learn English.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#195

Post by yencabulator »

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…

I've found I can decrease confusion a little by using

  from.{their company name}@mydomain.com
and when I care about making it more phish-proof, I can go for e.g.

  from.{their company name}.{some numbers}@mydomain.com

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#196

Post by sebastiennight »

genewitch wrote: post #181
greengreengrass wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best one was when someone said they were going to give me excellent service because “you work for corporate”, confusing the company name before vs. after the @ sign. I forget which company it was now but the agent was convinced I must be someone important. I was torn between explaining and letting them believe it :-) Most of the time, folks just don’t understand why their company name is in the address and they t…

maybe i can write a whatthreewords style "email identity mapper" so you put in "walmart.com" and it spits out "busybee223@example.com" and "autozone rewards" yields "Horserider184@example.com" then if you start getting spammed, you use the w3w style thing to reverse it and see what site/entity sold your email... then all of the "this doesn't/won't work because they'll just spam the entire domain" arguments go away, t…

SimpleLogin / ProtonMail and other providers do this for you automatically and call it an "alias". You can choose to have the company name visible in the first part of the email address or not.

(with the last part being your own domain of course)

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#197

Post by ycombiredd »

rmunn wrote: post #26
farfatched wrote: post #10

> It’s likely that more people out there are being filtered by badly-implemented form validation than there are being filtered by their own need of hand-holding. I wish this was asserted with evidence. The author might suggest this because they have unrealistic views of some users. > In the year of our lord 2026, you can reasonably expect your users to know how to type their own email address - or even better, auto-i…

> I have multiple family members who have healthy memory, but can't accurately remember their email address everytime: the localpart, the domain, the syntax, everything. I got Gmail early enough that I have (my first name) dot (my last name) at gmail dot com. About twenty years ago, I started getting strange emails. At first I thought they were spam, because they were addressed to me by name but I had never joined th…

Hey! Neat to see some more folks that have a story to tell about the oerhaps unintended side effects of the way the dot was implemented in gmail addresses.

Reading these dot-related comments reminded me that I once made one here about how I was able to leverage this possibly asynchronous dot-handling at gmail. Because the story is a bittersweet sentimental one for me I had to go back and read it now, and though I am sitting here with bad allergies streaming down my face, it also felt really nice to remember that.

I know this is a bit of a sideways comment, and I apologize for that but it isn't often I am overcome with emotion on HN, or on the topic of email addressing, and well, I appreciated the opportunity to re-read it now. Thanks.

You might find my gmail dots story interesting too. It's a little long, but the dot-character portion begins about a third of the way down in my comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46539424#46541149

Cheers!

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