I don't care if someone sells my data, I care if some company gets compromised and doesn't tell me. And it makes it harder for bots to crack the same account at multiple places.
Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
201–210 of 359 posts
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#202This 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 transa…
My Capital One card has virtual card numbers you can generate and you can kill them whenever you need to (or have them only work once). I use them any time I'm buying something outside the major markets like Amazon.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#203Very few legitimate companies will sell lists of raw email addresses, to anyone. There's very little money in it (email lists are cheap) and the potential upside of keeping the email addresses is way bigger, particularly when your email address is married up with behavioral data like what you bought, what pages you visited, what bank you use, etc.
Retailers make money from your email address by trying to use it to get you to spend more money with them. That can be as simple as sending you marketing emails--which many people consider spam! So when you hear people complain about "spam" from retailers, it's often this: real marketing emails that they are mad about getting.
Companies can also use customer email addresses as tokens for targeting in ad networks. In doing so, they may upload your email address to the ad platform. In that case they are sharing it with another company, but it won't result in spam. It will result in greater correlation between the otherwise separate tracking of your behavior across companies. In this case, using company-specific email addresses may actually be an advantage in terms of foiling such correlation.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#204Are people really inconvenienced by email spam anymore? My email is posted publicly all over the internet, it's been used to make hundreds of accounts for various other companies, it's been in innumerable data breaches, and I haven't changed addresses since GMail launched in 2004. In a bad week I might get two spam messages in my inbox. Each one is dealt with in probably around three seconds. On average I get less, p…
> And I can count on one hand the number of times since 2004 that an email that actually mattered was sent to my spam folder by mistake.
How often do you check? I see a few false positives a week.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#205So has anyone discovered a simple way to track all your canary emails in a tool like haveIbeenPwned ? That's been the only reason I don't 100% of the time generate an email per site.
I've also found burnermail to be a super useful tool, they have a chrome extension which lets you generate a site/day specific alias and have it forward to your inbox, you can block them in their site too.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#206I get spam to a certain company email. I can only assume it was due to a breach.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#207Earlier 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…
I used to do this, until I had to reply to an automated email for some customer support system. It rejected all my replies because the From: didn't match.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#208Let'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…
I wonder if OP's custom domain is making it "not valuable" for sale. Consider a buyer only interested in collecting Gmail addresses.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#209Are people really inconvenienced by email spam anymore? My email is posted publicly all over the internet, it's been used to make hundreds of accounts for various other companies, it's been in innumerable data breaches, and I haven't changed addresses since GMail launched in 2004. In a bad week I might get two spam messages in my inbox. Each one is dealt with in probably around three seconds. On average I get less, p…
> And I can count on one hand the number of times since 2004 that an email that actually mattered was sent to my spam folder by mistake. How often do you check? I see a few false positives a week.
Not often, but when I do check I don't find any so I don't see a need to check more often. And I don't later discover that I missed anything either.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#210That's absolutely not my experience. I still receive spam sent to adobe@, following their data breach in 2013.
It's not exactly Adobe selling my email to a spammer, but a data breach, and then marketers decided that would be a good target to blast their marketing emails.