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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

#321

Post by dotancohen »

OJFord wrote: post #310
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.

Yeah you can, you can default it to send from the address the email you're replying to was sent to too. It's the only thing I missed when I switched to Fastmail. (Which has since added it too, but not before I left in favour of my own SES-based solution.)

I'd love to know how. Tips welcome, thank you.

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

#322

Post by OJFord »

dotancohen wrote: post #321
OJFord wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you can, you can default it to send from the address the email you're replying to was sent to too. It's the only thing I missed when I switched to Fastmail. (Which has since added it too, but not before I left in favour of my own SES-based solution.)

I'd love to know how. Tips welcome, thank you.

Sorry, it's many years since I've used gmail, don't have an account to check and describe exactly. I suppose I should've said 'you certainly used to be able to', I don't know for sure you still can.. would be dumb to remove that though.

Iirc there was a section of settings called 'sending & receiving', and there was a drop-down to select 'reply from same address' or similar.

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

#323

Post by archi42 »

DocTomoe wrote: post #300
archi42 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The original post never said they were using these lists to send unsolicited emails. It's your assumption they are a spammer; while I said I can imagine non-nefarious reasons to collect these lists.

For example: A lot of pentesting companies offer "darknet research" as part of their engagement; these have a non-nefarious use for these leaks, including private addresses: Given a list of customer's employees it's easy to guess some obvious Gmail/GMX/Yahoo/... addresses and check if they might be affected by any leaks (password reuse is pretty popular, especially with the not so technically minded). Troy Hunt, who runs haveibeenpwned, uses these lists as well; I suppose he normalizes Gmail, too.

Yes, OP could still be an evil /dudett/..., but while "innocent until proven guilty" might not be a HN rule, it's still something I like to assume about random people in the internet.

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

#324

Post by brainbag »

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've had this happen a few times, but I was able to resolve them all except one cadre. Stitch Fix shut down my account abruptly, informing me of "security concerns" and disabled my account without any recourse after I'd spent a bunch of time setting it up. No offering of personal verification mattered. It was disappointing.

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

#325

Post by neoberg »

OJFord wrote: post #309
DocTomoe wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see how it's a GDPR violation, but it does turn any contact into spam - the +less address didn't solicit any contact. Not that spam laws are enforced or particularly enforceable.

It's a violation because you have to get explicit permission for each and every way of communication. So giving permission to be contacted through a single email address doesn't mean you gave permission for the phone or in this case another email address.

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

#326

Post by jasonm23 »

blodorn wrote: post #279
mutt2016 wrote: post #264

Earlier 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?

Non-greedy match (match what's necessary nothing more.)

The default is greedy... match match match nom nom nom!

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

#327

Post by jasonm23 »

jakopo87 wrote: post #315
wiml wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or use [.] so it's super clear on the a-human-is-reading-it parse.

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

#328

Post by [deleted] »

OJFord wrote: post #322
dotancohen wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know how. Tips welcome, thank you.

Sorry, it's many years since I've used gmail, don't have an account to check and describe exactly. I suppose I should've said 'you certainly used to be able to', I don't know for sure you still can.. would be dumb to remove that though. Iirc there was a section of settings called 'sending & receiving', and there was a drop-down to select 'reply from same address' or similar.

[deleted]

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

#329

Post by dotancohen »

OJFord wrote: post #322
dotancohen wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know how. Tips welcome, thank you.

Sorry, it's many years since I've used gmail, don't have an account to check and describe exactly. I suppose I should've said 'you certainly used to be able to', I don't know for sure you still can.. would be dumb to remove that though. Iirc there was a section of settings called 'sending & receiving', and there was a drop-down to select 'reply from same address' or similar.

That option is only for fixed addresses, not catchall addresses.

I.e. if your main email address is ojford@ojford.com but you're also preconfigured e.g. foobar@ojford.com you could set that option to have Gmail use either ojford@ojford.com or foobar@ojford.com as your return address, depending on the originating email's TO address. However, if you _also_ have a catchall address and somebody sends to newservice@ojford.com, even with the setting set your return address would be ojford@ojford.com.

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

#330

Post by newaccount74 »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #157
rotten wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've seen sites that disallow auto-generated addresses, super lame and makes me not want to use them, not sure how common that is today.

They can't easily filter Apples or Fastmails addresses, since they have @icloud.com / @fastmail.com domains.
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