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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 359 posts

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

#121

Post by raverbashing »

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…

> A few vendors got upset that I had their name in the address

Kinda annoying of then, maybe I would go for an opaque (or maybe just a simplified) canary. Like the initials or abbreviation

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

#122

Post by cimnine »

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.

Afaik 1password together with Fastmail, see https://1password.com/fastmail/ or https://www.fastmail.com/1password/, respectively.

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

#124

Post by georgyo »

This is not my experience, I too have been doing this for 10 years.

In my experience, I got tons of spam, especially after a leak.

By far, the _most_ spam I get to is get to government agencies and medical facilities. I started getting male enhancement messages to my parknyc (NYC parking meters) address in under a week after registering.

Since my addresses are never used for more than one service, I can be reasonable sure they had a leak of some sort, but it is also not suffice evidence to actually report it.

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

#125

Post by gpm »

fckgw wrote: post #93
gpm wrote: post #23

Maybe not 3rd party spam, but definitely first party spam. I gave a custom username email to a in-person store (big chain) with a rewards program because they were offering a huge discount if you did. Since then they've sent at least 1 email a day, with an average of about two (I've redirected all their emails to a folder I never look at). Which is a particularly remarkably obnoxious rate of sending emails... I've al…

So just unsubscribe from the mailing list then? Why are you setting up these custom filters instead of just clicking the link and opting out?

Because it's faster to set up a custom filter than search in the email for a link... I couldn't even tell you if there is an unsubscribe link (I mean I suppose I could go look, but I definitely never did).

Also after getting home and already having multiple marketing emails I was sort of curious about just how many they were going to send, which is why it's in its own folder.

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

#126

Post by YetAnotherNick »

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…

> A few vendors got upset that I had their name in the address

rot13 FTW

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

#127

Post by JadoJodo »

I've been doing this for a few years (first manually, now via FastMail's MaskedEmail feature) with good success. The only issues I've had are when one service gives the address allocated to them to another, related service. An example of this that recently occurred was when a service I wanted to use only offered GitHub SSO. That service was then handed my GitHub-only email address. I've had the same thing happen at Kickstarter. Overall a win, but still annoying.

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

#128

Post by sbf501 »

withzombies wrote: post #106

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

This is exactly my experience. Had I seen your HN post I wouldn't have bothered, because you've summed it up nicely. Especially the looks of disbelief I get when I say my email is their company name. Did it at a pet store recently and the cashier said to me: "You don't have to give me a fake email, just say you don't want to give me your email."

There's no real need to undo it now, however. It is more of after thought.

(I also didn't realize that I now must own this domain FOREVER because if I sell it, the next owner will have all of my email addresses for password resets.)

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

#129

Post by greenail »

The problem is not bad intentions or selling your information.

The problem is that they copy it into a DB and it is a globally unique identifier. Once this happens you have lost control. You can never ungive that GUID. Your only recourse becomes spam filtering or migrating to another email GUID and waiting until the new one gets leaked all over the intarwebs and then doing it again. Phone numbers are even worse.

The solution is fairly simple, as discovered by the OP. Don't give out the same GUIDs when you sign up for an online "relationship".

It is a shame this pattern exists, people should stop designing accounts like this.

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

ryantgtg wrote: post #118
f4c39012 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly easier* than running a domain, i've had luck with myemail+CompanyX@gmail.com when signing up to CompanyX. Gmail handles the '+' transparently (in the same way as it ignores '.') and delivers the email to myemail@gmail.com. It is fun to receive a survey about "an anonymous company you have used in the past"... sent to myemail+uber@gmail.com. *yet less reliable, '+' in email addresses isn't always accepted, an…

Wouldn’t it trivial for them to strip out all values from + to @ prior to selling your address?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN