One sure way to start getting spam with ANY email, is to publish an application on Google Play Store. You'll start getting emails not only from advertising offers, shady SDKs, or Android development, but event for unrelated products from China.
Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
131–140 of 359 posts
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#132I'm glad you had a good experience. I had a different one. I've ran my own domain for longer than you have, and many emails have been compromised. Some are 100% from companies selling the emails to sister companies. The majority, though, is from a company itself being compromised by hackers / database access / etc. LinkedIn, Neopets, ProFlowers, TeeSpring, etc. I can go on.
Exactly my experience. The leaked emails are pretty much always related to hacks/leaks of said companies.
I have a couple of addresses that look to have been sold (e.g. addresses used in cheap kickstarter campaigns), but that is more rare.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> So just unsubscribe from the mailing list then? I've encountered many companies that let you unsubscribe, then add you to a 'new' mailing list a few months later. You can usually identify these companies because when you click to unsubscribe they take you to a page with a dozen or more 'newsletters' that you have to uncheck to remove yourself from if you can't find the 'all' link.
Unsubscribe also frequently doesn't carry over when a company is sold to another, who then harvests every email ever mentioned anywhere to send new spam to.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#134Is 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 I have had this happen a few times. > Canaries are also a good indicator to detect if a company has been compromised. Yep, this is a fantastic use case.
I used this to determine that Xfinity was compromise, yet still no acknowledgement despite reporting the issue to them and they went through some spiel about how I received the email by mistake and continue to receive emails by mistake at _@. The only person I shared that email with was them, and never had the issue with another provider.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Placing a companies name in the address will signal a canary and they may likely filter Oh, good point. I guess I may have invalidated all my research! :|
If you're interested in getting "true" results, perhaps you could do something like this: name1@website.com name2@website.com etc. In a spreadsheet, you have one column with the number, and another with the company name. You might want to change this up, putting the identifier in different parts of the email address, to avoid similar "canary" signals. Personally, I use BitWarden to generate usernames for each website…
Just writing their name in reverse would probably work, and be less time consuming.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#136I'm legitmately baffled by this but thats because its not an actual experiment. You've limited your sample collection to retailers you in particular shop at. They could genuinely be good companies that aren't uncrupulous with your email. Meanwhile, I have no public website and no mailto: links for robots to crawl, yet I get plenty of spam I have no reason to ever receive. For example just looking at my gmail junk mail now I have a message from "ADT security" but coming from this email address which is obviously not their domain: adt45444@vne6bziks1jt25.w1123-4293.norelaut.us
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#137What does your email setup look like stack wise btw? Always curious to hear from people who are hosting their own email server.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#138I signed up for a magazine subscription, and was added to a ton of spam email offers. So maybe not retailers but there are plenty of businesses that will sell your email. Charities are another good example, they make a lot of their money selling their donor lists.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#139I have the same setup since forever but I do occasionally find one of the custom emails being used as SPAM (when this happens, I either delete it or replace with a new one). So it's very clear to me that those companies in specific either sold or had it's data stolen somehow.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#140I did the same. The one I used for my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription was drowning in spam.