Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by closewith » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:31 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #78

ziddoap wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not quite spam, it's not quite illegitimate, but it's not what I signed up for. If it's not what you signed up for, isn't that pretty much the definition of spam?

No,I don't think so. If you signed up to receive email, then it's going to be hard to show that you received email that's different from what you signed-up for. And if it's not Bulk, then it's simply email - not bulk, and not unsolicited. That's why it's important that spam continues to be defined as Unsolicited Bulk Email.

>If you signed up to receive email, then it's going to be hard to show that you received email that's different from what you signed-up for.

At least in the EU, if you make a complaint, it falls on the sender to assert the legal basis for sending the email, so it's on them to prove informed consent (if that's the basis they're relying on).

> That's why it's important that spam continues to be defined as Unsolicited Bulk Email.

I'm not sure you've made the case that's important. In the EU, spam has been long defined as unsolicited commercial communications (since the E-privacy Directive in 2002) - no requirement for it to be in bulk.

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

#152

Post by eganist » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:36 PM UTC

I've received spam to seven different addresses, all of which followed breaches which were previously or later publicized.

Just adding a sample.

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

#153

Post by seanp2k2 » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

nibbleshifter wrote: post #43

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 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.

If I have to provide an address to get a download link, that address will be either postmaster@aol.com or abuse@domain-of-the-company . EMailing the link to the provided address will probably just make me seek out different software. Make software that users want to sign up to hear more about; don't force them to opt in to marketing just to try something. It's the first impression and sets the tone with your company.

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

#154

Post by nibbleshifter » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:43 PM UTC

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?

Yes. I've written code that does this for parsing leaked email lists before as part of a normalizing step.

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

#155

Post by nibbleshifter » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

adamfeldman wrote: post #115

nibbleshifter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh with GSuite + a 5$ domain I get catch alls for minimal effort. I used to use + addressing schemes, but abandoned it for the reasons you mentioned (websites breaking horribly).

Exactly. Catch-all setup on Google Workspace/G Suite/too-many-renames is usually obtuse but it’s a one-time tutorial effort.

I wonder if there's a way to script setting it up to be honest, I end up about an hour deep in help docs each time I set up a new domain+email trying to work out how to make a catch all and how to configure the thing so replies come from the right email.

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

#156

Post by seanp2k2 » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:44 PM UTC

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #126

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

too much work to remember each time for logins if it's something frequently used. The iCloud way of generating emails is great but only works well on my iDevices. I used to use endjunk.com for everything, and it was the same kind of "anything@you.endjunk.com" setup, but one day they just disappeared with no warning and I lost a few accounts because of that. Learned my lesson and just switched to GMail.

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

#157

Post by seanp2k2 » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:45 PM UTC

rotten wrote: post #108

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...

I've seen sites that disallow auto-generated addresses, super lame and makes me not want to use them, not sure how common that is today.

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

#158

Post by slowmovintarget » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:45 PM UTC

bencollier49 wrote: post #135

registeredcorn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only if you actually want to receive their spam for research purposes.

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

#159

Post by jen729w » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:47 PM UTC

There’s a single reason that I gave up on this method: having to send outbound mail to these companies.

You sign up for a health plan using healthplan@example.com. Great, until you need to send them a document. You send it from myrealaddress@example.com, and they write back and say hey, that’s not the account on file, etc.

So now you have to set up healthplan@example.com, configure it in your mail client, etc. And now you have this long list of special addresses to remember to have to send from, depending on the situation.

Email is already something I loathe. Why would I make it harder on myself?

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

#160

Post by seanp2k2 » Mon, Aug 15, 2022, 7:47 PM UTC

registeredcorn wrote: post #100

sbf501 wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

Reading these over the phone to dinosaur financial institutions is pretty unfun though. I was doing something similar with generated usernames, had to call in to reset my password because some places operate like it's still 1983, and the person helping me probably thought I was nuts with my 30+chr random username.