I've also used company@mydomain type emails for about 6 years and my experience is different. I've had to close down several addresses due to spam. The worst offenders have been PartyPoker and Skrill, which appear to frequently sell my email address to unrelated gambling spammers.
Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
211–220 of 359 posts
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#212Earlier 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 switched to '-' instead of '+' which was a trivial change in exim.conf and saved my sanity because there was just too many places which either break on '+' or refuse to accept it in the first place.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#213There’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…
Fastmail allows sending from any address, the client supports it easily. There is also a few self-hostable mail clients that allow it. Historically I used a more convoluted method. When I used to use migadu (dont use them) I had a little script that would check the first line of any email I sent myself for a target email and resend it from the receive address. It was janky but worked.
> (dont use them)
Are you able to share what made you stop using them? I've been contemplating trying them out :-)
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#214So 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.
If you own your own domain, haveibeenpwned can show all compromised addresses for the entire domain. I don't know if it supports wildcard/pattern emails for things like gmail's plus addressing feature.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#215> or are spam filters that good?
Do know if you are getting _any_ spam or just that all of your spam is marked as such not reaching your inbox?
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#216Been using Hide My Email from Apple’s iCloud and I’ve been really loving it! Semi permanent fake addresses ending in @icloud.com that forward to my gmail address. Apple is also one of the few companies I’d probably trust to the task. Wish it was a standalone app rather than buried in the settings menu.
I also wish they had a standalone app to help manage the addresses. Like so many of their good features, eg password management, it can be a bit too hidden for those up us who want some control!
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#217Is 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...
Yes, and they recently enabled one time emails with your own custom domain, which really helps get around folks trying to identify and prevent this.
This is a killer feature, I love Fastmail.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#218Is 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
A few years ago I created an account with a freemium publisher with the email address their.domain@my.domain and as soon as I logged into my account I had full unlimited access to all content.
I suspect their system had a routine that detected staff accounts based on a string search for their domain.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#219> Is the fear of "people selling your email to spammers" a modern myth, or are spam filters that good?
I've been using custom email for a couple of decades. Definitely get spam on a bunch of them, including recently.
The worst though is the email I registered with the county clerk for voting. That one gets a ton of spam.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#220Earlier 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.
How do they disallow it?