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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

#291

Post by joshka »

I have 31 addresses (of hundreds-thousands) over a similar 10 year period 2012-2022. My guess is that most of these are things where there's been a database leak (often these appear in the hibp database).

> Is the fear of "people selling your email to spammers" a modern myth, or are spam filters that good?

If your spam filter is catching something, then you're receiving spam, it's just not being delivered.

For the most part, I get more ham (false positives) than negatives (actual spam).

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

#292

Post by joshka »

rotten wrote: post #108
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…

Fastmail offers a masked email feature for one-time email addresses: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...

I wish they'd open this up to use a subdomain, rather than the main domain.

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

#293

Post by joshka »

koliber wrote: post #145
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 was offered a few employee discounts by front line associate because of using an email address with a company name. I declined but found it awkward to explain the details.

I added @lists. to the email address and found that it lessened the need to explain.

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

#294

Post by joshka »

xdrosenheim wrote: post #287
sneak wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seen masked email integration in 1password https://1password.com/fastmail/ Or iCloud https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210425

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

#295

Post by Fnoord »

overspeed wrote: post #249
f4c39012 wrote: post #96

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…

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.

There's also the unstable handling of . symbol (dot or dots) in email address before @ symbol. Gmail allows dots in email address before @ and normalizes them, so the same address with or without dots works. This leads to funny behavior such as unlimited account creation with the same email address (yes, + symbol would also work for this but that works almost everywhere and is better known) or my wife thinking she does not have an account while she does, creating a new one instead.

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

#296

Post by denton-scratch »

dotancohen wrote: post #282
sneak wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> many people who grew up on web interfaces are intimidated by Thunderbird.

That surprises me; it's web interfaces that intimidate me.

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

#297

Post by CapsAdmin »

fckgw wrote: post #93
gpm wrote: post #23

Maybe not 3rd party spam, but definitely first party spam. I gave a custom username email to a in-person store (big chain) with a rewards program because they were offering a huge discount if you did. Since then they've sent at least 1 email a day, with an average of about two (I've redirected all their emails to a folder I never look at). Which is a particularly remarkably obnoxious rate of sending emails... I've al…

So just unsubscribe from the mailing list then? Why are you setting up these custom filters instead of just clicking the link and opting out?

I had custom filters for a while but I stopped using them, it became unmaintainable and caused some false positives.

I then resorted to unsubscribing, but in my experience that doesn't always seem to work. I could be wrong here as I haven't kept track of who I unsubscribe from and if I would still get newsletters after the fact. But I've experienced receiving newsletters from some company I could've sworn I just unsubscribed from a few times.

However it wouldn't be surprising if some website's unsubscribe feature was buggy. I can also imagine it's not being reported. Or if it was it, and you could figure out where to report to, the report would get lost on its way customer support to the people responsible.

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

#298

Post by Normal_gaussian »

josephb wrote: post #213
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail allows sending from any address, the client supports it easily. There is also a few self-hostable mail clients that allow it. Historically I used a more convoluted method. When I used to use migadu (dont use them) I had a little script that would check the first line of any email I sent myself for a target email and resend it from the receive address. It was janky but worked.

> (dont use them) Are you able to share what made you stop using them? I've been contemplating trying them out :-)

Here is a fullish comment thread involving me and a migadu employee on the matter. Note he still claims some kind of email was sent at the end (it wasn't). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24974369

There are a few other threads on HN about them as well.

Essentially they are a bargain basement supplier and expect them to treat you as accordingly. If you're happy with that then its fine!

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

#299

Post by denton-scratch »

ziddoap wrote: post #24
bombcar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compromises are 99% of those I see (similar setup) - the last 1% is acquired companies that have pivoted/do something else. It's not quite spam, it's not quite illegitimate, but it's not what I signed up for.

> It's not quite spam, it's not quite illegitimate, but it's not what I signed up for. If it's not what you signed up for, isn't that pretty much the definition of spam?

> If it's not what you signed up for, isn't that pretty much the definition of spam?

Nope. There's not much point in relying on a "definition" of spam that is essentially subjective. "Hey, I signed up for your newsletter, but what you've sent me isn't news to me, or I just don't like it; so it's spam".

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

#300

Post by DocTomoe »

archi42 wrote: post #196
nibbleshifter wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I've written code that does this for parsing leaked email lists before as part of a normalizing step.

Not sure why this is downvoted. I can imagine non-nefarious reasons to collect these lists.

It's spam detection evasion.

Also, depending on the legislative framework, it might be illegal: If I give company my email address with a plus and an identifier in it, I give them permission to contact me under that specific email (with the plus on it). If I as a result receive emails under another address (without the plus on it), this might be a GDPR violation.

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