31–40 of 91 posts
Worse would be if someone used the relay to intercept a password reset and pwn you.
Better to implement filters on Gmail or whatever, server side with the + suffix.
I think the best part about this is that it makes it easy to see who is selling your email. That can bring some accountability to these services that collect your email, and supposedly never use it.
In my experience, though, they deny everything when you follow-up.
At one point I started receiving third-party spam to santander_currentacct@[domain]. I contacted Santander, my bank, to ask how that e-mail address had leaked. They insisted that I must have used it elsewhere since their systems were watertight.
I changed it to something like santander_dontspamme@ and sure enough after a few months the spam started. This time Santander didn't even reply to my complaints.
I subsequently moved my current accounts to another bank, leaving £0.01 in several Santander accounts just to keep them open.
See also Throttle[0], which does a similar thing using a browser extension to generate random emails addresses.
With gmail, you can create a custom email for each service, like so: youremail+service@gmail.com Later on, if the service doesn't let you unsubscribe, or sells your email to other spammers, you can just set a filter to trash emails sent to youremail+service@gmail.com
Unfortunately, a lot of spammers use BCC, so AFAIK for those emails there's no way to figure out which email address was compromised, and thus no easy way to filter them out en masse.
What it is... Create a new uniqe mailhero email when you sign up to a new service etc. Mailhero will keep forward those emails to your real one until you choose not to. So if that email ends up in a spamming list and you get starting to get alot of unwanted email from different spammers that could be hard to block you could just stop the forwarding. So it works like a temporary email but is more permanent at the same…
Looks similar to https://www.spamgourmet.com/ which I used to use back in the day... and I guess is still a thing!
With gmail, you can create a custom email for each service, like so: youremail+service@gmail.com Later on, if the service doesn't let you unsubscribe, or sells your email to other spammers, you can just set a filter to trash emails sent to youremail+service@gmail.com
Anyone with half a clue that is doing heavy marketing via email, knows to strip the stuff after the +. BTW, the + is part of the email specification, and technically any email server not supporting it is broken.
Spammers are going to figure out how to manipulate these if it gains any traction; if I were a spammer, I would just send each email from a different MH email address with the same username. See also Throttle[0], which does a similar thing using a browser extension to generate random emails addresses. [0]: https://throttlehq.com
Sounds awesome, would love to try it. Spent 5 minutes trying to sign up, but every variation of usernames that I tried were taken. This normally wouldn't be an issue to complain about, except that in order to test whether a username is available or not, I have to enter the username, password, and captcha every time. Please please please tell me whether or not a username is taken as a type it before I go further.
The really good news is that all mails are always buffered on another server, so even if the whole thing was to go down, all mails will reach its destination in a timely manner.
With gmail, you can create a custom email for each service, like so: youremail+service@gmail.com Later on, if the service doesn't let you unsubscribe, or sells your email to other spammers, you can just set a filter to trash emails sent to youremail+service@gmail.com
I've been doing something similar, except with a Google Apps catch-all address. Unfortunately, a lot of spammers use BCC, so AFAIK for those emails there's no way to figure out which email address was compromised, and thus no easy way to filter them out en masse.
No amount of BCC'ing affects that header because it is set by gmail itself, not by the emitter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could make your username be some random hash?
> You could make your username be some random hash? Why not? 285e5c0452918bf77370c4a013317be4cf5e1ff690cc33a7346e837f59cdca58@foobarbaz.invalid is, I believe, a valid email address. If that's too long, you can always truncate it.