Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing • Hacker News Board

Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing

#31

Post by rahimnathwani » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 7:31 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

agwa wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tip: use a subdomain as your catchall (e.g. company@mail.example.com). I've been doing this for five years and haven't gotten a single spam to a random address. While there are various ways to learn about a domain's existence, subdomains fly under the radar.

That is an awesome tip. I stopped using a catch all when folks were doing reflected spam (trying to get my mail server to 'bounce' the email back to the spam target).

I'm curious: did you lose any emails when you turned off catch-all? I would like to turn off catch-all, but I receive a lot of (mostly automated) email to various addresses, and I don't want to set up a long list of email aliases.

Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing

#32

Post by mike-cardwell » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 1:50 PM UTC

I built a system years ago for automatically expiring email addresses: https://grepular.com/Automatically_Expiring_Email_Addresses

You can email any address of the format "YY-MM-DD"@tmp.grepular.com and it will work, but only if the YY-MM-DD date is in the future. Ie, 2013-12-25@tmp.grepular.com will work from now until Christmas and will bounce after that date.

It's really useful for signing up to services that I don't intend to use after that day, or for entering competitions etc. Competition draw is in a month? I'll pick an email address which expires in about 2 months and enter with that one.

Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing

#33

Post by computer » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 2:41 PM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #31

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an awesome tip. I stopped using a catch all when folks were doing reflected spam (trying to get my mail server to 'bounce' the email back to the spam target).

I'm curious: did you lose any emails when you turned off catch-all? I would like to turn off catch-all, but I receive a lot of (mostly automated) email to various addresses, and I don't want to set up a long list of email aliases.

When I moved away from catch-all, I analyzed my emails from the past 5 years to find all the email addresses I used (grep on my Maildir to find To: *, and then uniq) and then simply added ~15 forwarders. Haven't missed anything I cared about since.

Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing

#34

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Dec 18, 2013, 4:40 PM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #31

ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an awesome tip. I stopped using a catch all when folks were doing reflected spam (trying to get my mail server to 'bounce' the email back to the spam target).

I'm curious: did you lose any emails when you turned off catch-all? I would like to turn off catch-all, but I receive a lot of (mostly automated) email to various addresses, and I don't want to set up a long list of email aliases.

My catch all dumps the from line and the subject line and date into a log. I've got a perl script that scans it once a week for anyone in my contacts list. I did create a set of ecommerce/web site aliases which are all structured similarly (prefix-vendor@maildaomin.com) which are processed separately.