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

me@example.org -> _me@example.org. "Yup now the account is deleted, we hope to see you again soon!"

It's too bad the GDPR authority in the Netherlands is much too swamped to care about a literal purge option doing literally nothing. In both instances, I was still able to login to the account with the original password (clearly not information necessary for tax record reasons, or whatever excuse they might come up with). I don't always check the developer console for the API response that might hint at this, and don't delete accounts that often to begin with, so it wouldn't even surprise me if a majority of services turned out to do something similar under the hood.

Screenshot: https://snipboard.io/Y2MpbU.jpg (DigitalOcean's account deletion page, this is the option I checked but was still able to log in. The other offender, I don't want to even give the benefit of free negative publicity.)

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Catch-alls are fun. Sometimes when I email a company, like Contoso@mydomain.example.org, I will subsequently receive business email from their vendor (helpdesk or IT or whatever service they provide that made my email end up in the autocomplete) that was intended for their contact person at Contoso. I've always let them know but it feels rather awkward and they never reply to me :)

I've gotten spam to places that have had their databases leaked and widely reported. Off the top of my head, Zynga and Consumerist.

I've also gotten spam from individual eBay vendors (etc), to my ebay@ and paypal@ address. But there's no way to particularly stop that, beyond knowing that ebay and paypal leak my email address.

I get a lot of spam to an admin@ address on a domain I bought that was evidently in use previously.

I also get spam from companies I used quite a while ago, and were either acquired and renamed, or are still in business. I haven't purchased or even signed into the website of "PCB Fab Express" in over 15 years, but they still see fit to email me.

In general I don't find it that much of a hassle to hit 'd' on spam, hence not particularly caring about a spam filter, or not setting up a procmail recipe that bounces the spammy businesses.

FWIW I actually don't get much spam any more to the first category of email leaks. I'm sure it goes in waves with whatever lists are in vogue.

I still do find the custom email addresses nice for creating a small impediment to cross-referencing surveillance data, and don't see any reason to stop them. If the saying "YourCompany@" to a Your Company rep was really that awkward, I'd switch to opaque shorter handles, but it hasn't been a problem. Sometimes I'll just own it and say I do this so I know when companies sell my email address to spammers.

Also, I read my email with mutt in a terminal, possibly passing it through lynx when I need to. If my client loaded image bugs or other html nonsense, my experience might be much different.