221–230 of 359 posts
I've definitely had spam to some of mine -- Especially t-mobile after they had a compromize some years back.
That being said, this alone seems to work great! I've always been curious about how many tracking companies have sophisticated-enough logic that they can tell two email addresses from the same domain belong to the same person. Probably not many, since it's such a niche solution.
Now I need to get better at using random names instead of my own, when possible.
The most spammy of them has been equifax, but that one was so publicly hacked that I didn't need spam to know about it. Confirmation has its value I guess. It'd be nice to know if equifax sold the information and got hacked, that's entirely ambiguous and now equifax has plausible deniability thanks to the hack. Le sigh.
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.
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.
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 rot13 FTW
Google becomes hpphar.
Easy to [en/de]code on the fly by looking at your keyboard.
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…
Wouldn’t it trivial for them to strip out all values from + to @ prior to selling your address?
I'm glad you had a good experience. I had a different one. I've ran my own domain for longer than you have, and many emails have been compromised. Some are 100% from companies selling the emails to sister companies. The majority, though, is from a company itself being compromised by hackers / database access / etc. LinkedIn, Neopets, ProFlowers, TeeSpring, etc. I can go on.
The worst offender for me is an email address I used to get a fishing license from the state fish and wildlife group. As soon as I did that, I started getting advertisements from some outfitter/prepper type places. Not sure if they bought the address or if licensee info is public in my state.
It’s on another level now.