I get physical mail spam to unique names in billing addresses I have used for retailers.
It's definitely a problem for postal mail addresses.
Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
271–280 of 359 posts
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#272Are 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…
> Are people really inconvenienced by email spam anymore?
Now we get inconvenienced by spam in the form of overactive spam filters that take critically important messages from people we've been communicating with for years and files them as spam.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#273Earlier 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…
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.
You can send emails with any From: header you wish.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#274Is 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.
If only there were some convenient software for keeping track of your unique login names and passwords for each site you use.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#275Earlier 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…
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.
Can confirm; once signed up as foo+bar@example.com, everything worked (including the confirmation mail)… and then the address was automatically normalized (‽) as foobar@example.com and I could no longer receive any mail (since that's a different account altogether).
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t it trivial for them to strip out all values from + to @ prior to selling your address?
Yes. I've written code that does this for parsing leaked email lists before as part of a normalizing step.
I imagine the challenge is knowing what parsing rules apply to which domains. Gmail supports the + thing, but that's non-standard. Is that something you tried to handle in a general way?
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#277Very 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…
One big exception to this is political campaigns and non profits who will sell all the info they possible can on you for 2 cents to as many people as they can.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#278I have a feeling LinkedIn is the new spam abuser. I have no direct proof (it could be me signing up to a shady conference / email list) but the moment I got a new company email address and a co-founder title, the floodgates got opened, I get 4-5 "handcrafted" (automated to look like ones) emails plus the "following up to make sure you got my email" or "bringing it up your mailbox", most have no unsubscribe links and have a "let us know if you don't want to hear from us again". From legal services, graphic design, off shore hiring / staff augmentation, financial services.
I get it that people need to sell to stay in business, so does my company, but it's starting to be a nuisance, especially since it many times passes the spam filters, and each email gets 2-3 "just following up" emails.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just adding an @ to the string match would make it a bit more robust. (Would still be vulnerable to jim@their.domain.my.domain , so add a $ on the end if it’s a regexp.) But even with the most rudimentary web-dev languages you can replace the inner string match with a lowercase transform, split on @ and perform an exact string compare. Insanely simple stuff. Probably still a one-liner in any sane/productive framework…
Frameworks usually have some sort of email parser. Email parsing is non trivial. But I agree matching .*?@domain.com$ would probably work fine.
What is the purpose of the ? here?