This is a very bad idea which I have also done and am currently in the long process of undoing. I have >800 email addresses on my own domain. What happens if I do not renew the domain name - either by accidentally missing the renewal date or in the extreme example, if I die? At that point anyone can register the domain and can receive (and send) email for all my accounts, very likely leading to the accounts being compromised. Even if I'm dead I still don't want my mortgage or bank accounts being hacked, I want them in the hands of my heirs. So yeah... very bad idea or at the very least, not worth the minor reduction in spam for the risk.
Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
281–290 of 359 posts
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not from within Gmail's web interface.
I personally use Thunderbird and AWS SES to send mail, but many people who grew up on web interfaces are intimidated by Thunderbird.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#283I have gotten random spam email to one so far from https://parkmobile.io/ and it came from them getting breached.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It makes the preceding * less "greedy". I don't think it has any effect on the set of strings matched by this regexp, though, which is a simple string suffix check.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#285You know what received spam till I blocked it? ledgerwallet@domain.tld
I don’t think any half-way decent sites are selling your mails to spammer, but hacks and breaches happen, as they did to ledger [0].
Besides that, there’s a chinese store and a vaping store that both have no easy unsubscribe, so those addresses are also blocked.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#286Is 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…
> few vendors got upset that I had their name in the address
No one got upset, but a record label was confused and asked me about it, and another company had their legal department ask me under what license I use their TM ;) In both cases a simple explanation was the end of it.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you mean password manager, sure. But I was thinking of e-mails received, how would I know if the emails came from the "right" sites? Would have to open up a text file, or login to my password manager, just to check. I do not think that is a great way to keep track of it.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#288Is 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…
We used to have one of the top range email marketing software at work. Emails, such as info@, contact@ and some others are automatically excluded and you can't even send any marketing to those.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#289checks spam folder
godaddy@kraln.com allwinner10@kraln.com couponmom@kraln.com ppcgeeks@kraln.com
Each one either directly or indirectly related to a known breach (i.e. haveibeenpwned). It's not just selling your email that could happen, but also careless IT security resulting in your email getting in the hands of spammers.
Re: Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
#290I've done this since 1998 and generally agree with you, although I've had a handful that get spammed. Maybe I sign up to more dubious sites.