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

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

#241

Post by donarb »

mkl wrote: post #189
LinuxBender wrote: post #36

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 I've had more confused than upset, but Samsung straight-up refuses to accept email addresses with "samsung" in them. I'm not sure what they think they're accomplishing. I think I get more spam from hacked/leaked email databases than sold ones. Dropbox is the worst (signed up and used it briefly over a decade ago, and now suffer an eternity of spam).

You should've just changed the address to 'spamsung'.

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

#242

Post by tomcam »

xdrosenheim wrote: post #240
LinuxBender wrote: post #36

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…

I have been thinking about using some sort of UUID-generator ([UUID]@mydomain.xz) whenever I sign up for a new site, but I just can not think of a _good_ way to keep track of them.

Database? Text file?

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

#243

Post by flog »

xdrosenheim wrote: post #240
LinuxBender wrote: post #36

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…

I have been thinking about using some sort of UUID-generator ([UUID]@mydomain.xz) whenever I sign up for a new site, but I just can not think of a _good_ way to keep track of them.

1Password?

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

#245

Post by spcebar »

reaperducer wrote: post #168
seanp2k2 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading these over the phone to dinosaur financial institutions is pretty unfun though. I was doing something similar with generated usernames, had to call in to reset my password because some places operate like it's still 1983, and the person helping me probably thought I was nuts with my 30+chr random username.

Sounds like you use Bank of America, too! I had to read my e-mail address to someone there just last week.

I had this experience with a different bank (with an embarrassing email address). I wonder if there's some compliance thing here for banks.

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

#246

Post by Macha »

snowwrestler wrote: post #203

Very 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 ge…

> 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.

This is written like it's "not spam", but I'd consider that unsolicited marketing emails because I bought something once to be clearly spam - the only way these emails would not be spam to me would be if there was some sort of affirmative, opt in that was clear about what you're opting in for.

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

#247

Post by hbosch »

0xjmp wrote: post #244

Buying a house. Lender immediately sold my email and phone number and I’ve been getting about a dozen aggressive sales messages a day. But hey, maybe it’s just a few bad apples.

Phone, physical mail, e-mail too. Buying a house probably netted me more spam than anything I've ever signed up for online.

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

#248

Post by Uptrenda »

You got lucky. Somehow you managed to avoid any one of those retailers being hacked and ending up in an email dump. Somehow you also avoided any website that does marketing or promotional emails (idk how?) Many companies put it in their ToS that they will send promotional emails by using their service. I'd wager next to no one wants a marketing email but businesses still delude themselves into thinking their customers won't hate them for it.

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

#249

Post by overspeed »

f4c39012 wrote: post #96
adamfeldman wrote: post #45

Earlier 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 can attest to the unstable handling of '+' suffixed emails. UPS allowed me to ship a package as guest with myemail+ups@gmail.com but wouldn't let me create an account with the same email ID. I had no way to track the package pickup onwards.

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

#250

Post by makeitdouble »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #126
LinuxBender wrote: post #36

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

You probably want to stay upset and explain why they are. I feel working around the issue is counter to the point.
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