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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

#311

Post by lock-the-spock »

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...

But it makes it very difficult to ever switch to a different provider...

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

#312

Post by OJFord »

masklinn wrote: post #190
buu700 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a funny interaction with a financial institution about this at one point. They were having a lot of trouble understanding that company@mydomain.com was the correct email address. Eventually the conversation went like: "So you're saying you created a new email address just to use with us?" "Sure, yeah." "...That's weird."

The weirdest of these i had were support agents who thought I was a colleague because I usually use @

I got cc'd into internal discussions at the management company for my flat block, about the block.

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

#313

Post by t0k0l0sh »

I've done the same for about 20 years, usually using @ or @

When I start receiving spam at one of these aliases, I'll update my email address with the relevant site(s), then after a cooldown period to ensure no more legitimate mail arrives at the original alias, I'll use the original alias as a spam trap - any mail sent to it is learned as spam, then accepted and discarded by my MTA.

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

#314

Post by tome »

f4c39012 wrote: post #96
adamfeldman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly my use-case and experience after many years of custom catch-all'ing. I've noticed a couple breaches, and also a few unexpected transfers of my email address between semi-related parties. Just once it appeared an address was sold via a marketing list, after filling out a lead-form for a free online conference hosted by multiple companies that you've seen on HN. Surprisingly, unsubscribing tends to stop…

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…

How did they expect you to respond to a survey about an anonymous company?

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

#315

Post by jakopo87 »

wiml wrote: post #284
blodorn wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, but the dot should be escaped because it matches any character, so "@domain\.com$" should just works for.

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

#316

Post by jatin085 »

I had a Yahoo account created in year 2002, the time when most of the sites including Yahoo Mail (I suppose) did not support HTTPS. Not sure if that was the reason but with every email exchanged, I found the number of spam messages kept increasing. Later in around 2015, I started using Yahoo's 'Disposable Email Addresses' features but the spam load on my original email address was too high that I had to create a new user account in a year or two later.

I still use Yahoo Mail primarily because of its 'Disposable Email Addresses' super-feature. For my new Yahoo account, I have maintained the habit of creating new disposable email addresses for every site I need to register with. The disposable addresses always contain the name of site/organization I am registering with. I have also kept a few pre-created email addresses at my disposal :) in case I need to provide one on a retail store.

In last five years, there hasn't been a single spam message on any of these disposable addresses. I always had the option to delete these addresses as soon as I start receiving spams on them but until date, I never needed to exercise them. The messages that are moved to Spam folder are always false positives, so in a way, I don't lose sight of any message just because the mailing service decided to mark it as spam.

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

#317

Post by leaflets2 »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #43
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…

> A few vendors got upset that I had their name in the address I have had this happen a few times. > Canaries are also a good indicator to detect if a company has been compromised. Yep, this is a fantastic use case.

> fantastic use case

How does it work?

If a company to which you have provided an email address, gets compromised, it's likely that you'll start getting automated pishing emails to that address? And that the address ends up in... some "warning" database like Have I Been Pawned, and you'll get notified?

Or something else?

Seems like a good idea :-)

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

#318

Post by leaflets2 »

Fnoord wrote: post #295
overspeed wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

> unlimited account creation

Nice, hadn't thought about :-)

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

#319

Post by dotancohen »

denton-scratch wrote: post #296
dotancohen wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I also prefer Thunderbird. But almost nobody that I've introduced it to was interested in using it.

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

#320

Post by 8organicbits »

DocTomoe wrote: post #304
8organicbits wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Gmail supports the + thing, but that's non-standard Plusaddressing is valid and has been since 1982[1]. It's part of RFC822 and the subsequent RFC2822. The fact that many websites do not allow + in an email address during validation is a common programming mistake and the sign of an undertrained engineer. [1] https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/plus-signs-in-email-a...

Sorry, I should have been clearer. Gmail will place messages for user@gmail.com and user+foo@gmail.com in the same mailbox. The grandparent comment talks about normalizing the address by removing stuff after the +. This sort of deduplicates the addresses. Other platforms may have distinct mailboxes for user and user+foo, so you can't strip it on those platforms. The mapping of user+foo to user is non-standard.

There won't be a general approach to deduplicating addresses that map to the same mailbox as the mapping rules aren't always public. But for Gmail, the rule is public, so a best effort deduplication could strip the +.

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