I never had any spam come to my =@domain email address, despite being scrapeable on the web. ;)
Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
161–170 of 359 posts
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh, I’ve never realized replies could be made to come from the right email. I manually add addresses as-needed (once a month or so).
I think there’s an unofficial Terraform provider but I haven’t looked recently.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#163Not a myth. 20 years on, still receiving spam to an email address I used to order a male enhancement product.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#164I actually also do this and get into funny episodes because people think I work for the company when giving out the email address in physical stores.
One time I actually got my phone fixed faster because the receptionist thought I was Samsung worker (samsung@m.....pt) and their store were Samsung partners.
Anyway, I also do not receive any spam on the custom ones.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#165This 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…
I've had CCs stolen because DMV + FasTrak required CC info and can't use PayPal. PayPal / Shop are great because they don't share your actual CC info with the merchant, only a one-time token for that specific transaction. All credit cards should work this way, where you'd log into your bank or 2FA with your bank (or Visa / MasterCard) and they'd provide the merchant with an auth code or something just for that transaction for that invoice to that merchant, instead of giving them the keys to the actual card.
They even do have something called "Visa Secure" and "Mastercard Identity Check" ( see https://stripe.com/guides/3d-secure-2 ) but I've never seen this come up in practice. I guess it's easier for them to just let merchants assume the fraud risk. We need some laws that put the burden on the card issuers to get them to actually care about CC fraud, but obviously the ones benefiting from the current system are very well-funded and have lots of sway with lawmakers.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Expect this to change, if Apple's anonymous e-mail forwarding becomes popular.
Just like when IT departments (including the one at my company) insisted that everyone use Blackberries because iPhones weren't suitable for a corporate environment.
Once enough C-levels start using any feature, it spreads like wildfire.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#167There’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 no…
Depends on your setup I suppose. I use FastMail for this purpose and it both automatically sets the `From` based on the `To` of the email I'm responding to and allows me to click in to the `From` email and type in whatever I want for the local part before sending.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#168Earlier 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…
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.
Sounds like you use Bank of America, too!
I had to read my e-mail address to someone there just last week.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#169There’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 no…
Email alias services can make this process a little easier, though certainly not painless, by letting you create reverse sending email addresses [1].
1: https://simplelogin.io/docs/getting-started/reverse-alias/
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#170Let's consider a few things: 1) Just because it hasn't happened to you, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I have quite a few examples of companies selling or otherwise sharing, whether intentionally or through compromise, my email addresses. 2) If someone (some company) is going to sell email addresses, it's not unreasonable to imagine that they'd want to remove any addresses that would directly link those address…
For point 2, at least it's a form of personal protection? Sufficient a reason for me to use it if I'd be excluded from leaks.