I personally have no problems with catch-all. I even append random salt to email.
Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
231–240 of 304 posts
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody who happens to have your address. That does seem beneficial for the most part, but do you have ideas about how to handle the use cases like establishing new relationships (what, if anything, do you put on business cards?) or allowing the general public or a b…
Phone numbers too. Can you imagine if you could give out a different phone number to each company and you could put a call limit, allowed call times, as well as a date expiration on the phone number you gave out. It could all be linked to specific companies, where if you got a spam call, you could report it and the company you entrusted it with would get a fine, or possibly the call would simply not go through.
Google voice allows you to set what times it will forward numbers, so that gives you a second 'group' of contacts you can assign call times to (give them your voice number, allow them through do not disturb if necessary). It rather surprises me that there's no app for granular ringtone settings to allow calls from certain contacts only at certain times or on certain days.
- allow work calls and disallow family calls 9-5 weekdays only - allow family calls but not work calls to bypass do not disturb by ringing a second time - allow annoying acquaintance who wants tech support to only call on weekends, and to only ring on second call - if working two jobs, prevent each workplace from calling during other workplace's scheduled hours - add geofencing. don't allow community/neighbor calls while at work.
Basically, just add rules for each contact/group for when your phone will ring. Android used to have multiple sound profiles available, and IIRC allowed you to change the volume and default ringer, these could be activated automatically on a schedule. Now we only have Do Not Disturb, and that's it.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#233I’ve been using this style of catch-all address for years. I’ve never had to explain, and have only once had an issue with it, last year when I scheduled an appointment with a business that I’ll call Alpha Beta Gamma, and they rang me a few minutes later saying they couldn’t confirm the appointment properly because their system was objecting to the email address I’d provided, which was alphabetagamma@, and maybe that was because of their business name being in it, so could we try something else, like abg@ (yes, they made the suggestion), and that worked.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did that change? My AliExpress account is using myname@mydomain.co.uk
I don’t know, I registered some time last year. Maybe it’s also the TLD? I have .me.
I've got a first@last.family. My dentist and several large companies refuse to accept this as a valid email address, so I have to use an email that doesn't identify me personally by name (uses efreak instead of my name). This annoys me every time I deal with them, especially since some of these sites use my email address as a username. I've been locked out from logging in on other devices a couple times for trying too many passwords when the problem was the address, not the password.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#235I blacklisted a lot of my catch-all addresses because of spam.
Paypal/ebay is the worst offender, I had to start rotating that one,. Every 2nd oversea seller seems to sell your mail address.
joby.com (making these nice tentacle tripods) is one of the offenders who got breached, refused to reply to my inquiry about it and later blocked me on twitter when I tried to stir things up there.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#236Been using a catch all email domain since 2005. I've not had any major issues with it. The entire "calling up and having to explain the username" thing is few and far between. Had that conversation in person and over the phone dozens of times, at most I get a little ask to verify I spoke correctly. Customer support doesn't care. They have people calling them up with an email address of "420hotcock69 at something dot…
Samsung does this, and it annoys me every so often. I'm using sammysung@ because they won't let me use samsung@. There's a couple others like this as well.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#237I'm using catch all since forever. I regret nothing. Two stories: I don't use mails like facebook@domain uber@domain - that's too obvious. And knowing that may often disclose that I actually have an account registered on given page. I don't want that, so I go full random, using few words I have in mind, current few words from the song I'm listening too, etc. So password manager helps me with e-mails too. But Sometime…
I use myname-shortbusinessname@mydomain and once the delivery person for a pizza place i ordered from fairly regularly asked if i worked for the store somehow. I changed the email i used with them to one that was less obvious after that.
Not as exciting as getting accused of trademark infringement, but it’s interesting how people interpret these things.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#238I'm using catch all since forever. I regret nothing. Two stories: I don't use mails like facebook@domain uber@domain - that's too obvious. And knowing that may often disclose that I actually have an account registered on given page. I don't want that, so I go full random, using few words I have in mind, current few words from the song I'm listening too, etc. So password manager helps me with e-mails too. But Sometime…
> When I started with catch-all I was actually using mails like companyname@mydomain […] I missed out on a dentist appointment because of this. They thought I was a robot. I blame gmail.
My ham radio certification was issued to a nonsensical address because the exam coordinator crammed @gmail.com onto the end without me knowing.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#239Never had any trouble with catch-all. Except once in about twenty years have I met a pissed off restaurant owner at my table who thought I'd hacked his website. Only thing I do different since is that I sometimes use `base64@domain.com`.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a couple too: Panicked phone call from a jeweller who wanted to know how and why '[their] domain was in my email address'; think he sort of understood once I explained, but still said something like 'can't be too careful in this business' - well sure ok but what am I going to do with.. oh nevermind! Password lockout/reset over the phone, reading my 100ch 'memorable phrase' as generated by pass... Gave the guy…
That is a major downside with putting gibberish in for answers to security questions… let’s hackers socially engineer support into letting you get access by saying something like, “oh man, I just mashed on my keyboard for that I don’t remember!” You would hope it wouldn’t work, but it probably will.
That’s a good point. It’s better to use wrong but plausible answers or random sentences (some password managers can generate phrases from a word list)