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

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

#181

Post by jdmichal »

f4c39012 wrote: post #96
adamfeldman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly my use-case and experience after many years of custom catch-all'ing. I've noticed a couple breaches, and also a few unexpected transfers of my email address between semi-related parties. Just once it appeared an address was sold via a marketing list, after filling out a lead-form for a free online conference hosted by multiple companies that you've seen on HN. Surprisingly, unsubscribing tends to stop…

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…

Sometimes it's only partly supported, in the sense that the website will just break if your email has a `+`. I'm pretty sure I encountered that one with both Disney and Royal Caribbean reservation workflows just flat out breaking.

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

#182

Post by xwowsersx »

I use fastmail and I have created many aliases. Some in order to avoid spam, others to help organize my inbox.

One of my aliases was clearly compromised and it is now sent a lot of spam.

Do I simply delete the alias and retire it and update my email with whatever services I care to hear from?

As an aside, I have found the spam filter on Fastmail to be pretty bad. Anyone else have this experience?

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

#183

Post by nbk_2000 »

PebblesRox wrote: post #97
dspillett wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, though go with “I use the incoming address name to file things into the right folder, so work things, banking things, shopping, and such, are separated” – I don't butter them up by making them sound important enough that I created a mail inbox just for them. If they still object then I don't sign up. I've had web form refuse to accept an email address with their company name in, so that sale went elsewhere, and…

I guess ROT13 could also be a last resort if signing up is important enough.

Slightly mangling the name (e.g. target => trget) is another way.

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

#184

Post by rascul »

xwowsersx wrote: post #182

I use fastmail and I have created many aliases. Some in order to avoid spam, others to help organize my inbox. One of my aliases was clearly compromised and it is now sent a lot of spam. Do I simply delete the alias and retire it and update my email with whatever services I care to hear from? As an aside, I have found the spam filter on Fastmail to be pretty bad. Anyone else have this experience?

> others to help organize my inbox

This is a big one for me. Some companies will send me mails from a bunch of different email addresses, sometimes with different domains. So much easier to have one rule for one of my email addresses than a bunch of rules for a bunch of theirs that I don't even know of yet.

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

#185

Post by microtonal »

xwowsersx wrote: post #182

I use fastmail and I have created many aliases. Some in order to avoid spam, others to help organize my inbox. One of my aliases was clearly compromised and it is now sent a lot of spam. Do I simply delete the alias and retire it and update my email with whatever services I care to hear from? As an aside, I have found the spam filter on Fastmail to be pretty bad. Anyone else have this experience?

As an aside, I have found the spam filter on Fastmail to be pretty bad. Anyone else have this experience?

Same. I love Fastmail, but even after almost a decade of training, spam filtering is quite bad compared to eg. Google Mail.

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

#186

Post by buu700 »

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…

I had a funny interaction with a financial institution about this at one point. They were having a lot of trouble understanding that company@mydomain.com was the correct email address.

Eventually the conversation went like:

"So you're saying you created a new email address just to use with us?"

"Sure, yeah."

"...That's weird."

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

#187

Post by remus »

jdmichal wrote: post #181
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…

Sometimes it's only partly supported, in the sense that the website will just break if your email has a `+`. I'm pretty sure I encountered that one with both Disney and Royal Caribbean reservation workflows just flat out breaking.

> I'm pretty sure I encountered that one with both Disney and Royal Caribbean reservation workflows just flat out breaking.

My favourite is services that let you sign up with a + in the address but then break when you try and login or reset your password.

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

#188

Post by jen729w »

cdubzzz wrote: post #167
jen729w wrote: post #159

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 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.

Ah that’s cool. I don’t think it did that when I used them, and I use Mail.app anyway.

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

#189

Post by mkl »

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've had more confused than upset, but Samsung straight-up refuses to accept email addresses with "samsung" in them. I'm not sure what they think they're accomplishing.

I think I get more spam from hacked/leaked email databases than sold ones. Dropbox is the worst (signed up and used it briefly over a decade ago, and now suffer an eternity of spam).

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

#190

Post by masklinn »

buu700 wrote: post #186
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…

I had a funny interaction with a financial institution about this at one point. They were having a lot of trouble understanding that company@mydomain.com was the correct email address. Eventually the conversation went like: "So you're saying you created a new email address just to use with us?" "Sure, yeah." "...That's weird."

The weirdest of these i had were support agents who thought I was a colleague because I usually use @
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