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Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

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Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#41

Post by buu700 »

iamben wrote: post #14
sans_souse wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stay tuned I have a pretty cool project I plan on launching very soon. It takes the email alias to the next level, using them as meta tags to actually allow users to trace the source of shady data exchanges. I'm working on the guide and I'm hoping to actually start a community effort here to hold companies accountable for responsible use of PII

I'm interested. How does it differ from using: name+service@gmail.com or service@myowndomain.com ...to figure out where the spam originated?

> service@myowndomain.com

Just be aware that this may be very confusing to customer support agents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32475178

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#42

Post by homebrewer »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #21
iamben wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested. How does it differ from using: name+service@gmail.com or service@myowndomain.com ...to figure out where the spam originated?

Everybody knows name+something@ maps to name@ so it’s trivial for bad actors to strip the plus part and just spam you directly, losing the per-correspondent distinction.

Which is covered by GP's second suggestion. I add short random password-like strings to these aliases to thwart spammers who might be trying obvious aliases, turning e.g paypal@example.com into paypal.nsi873g@example.com

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#43

Post by lurk2 »

macrolime wrote: post #25
firefax wrote: post #7

I wish they'd let me recover my original -- I lost my TOTP generator, and the codes I'd written down in a paper notebook were rejected. I even hunted down the electronic copy in case there was a transcription error -- seemed like some failure in their systems was causing me to lose access despite having followed proper procedures. Lost a decade and a half of correspondence dating back to my teenage years. I had impor…

I had something kinda similar happen to my hotmail account. While I didn't lose access to it, I lost more than a decade of correspondence dating back to my teenage years. The reason was that Microsoft at some point required you to "login" once every 30 days. It seems they only counted logins through their web interface or something like that, so even though I was receiving emails daily, I didn't trigger a "login" in…

This happened to me ten years ago. A while later they did the same thing with my Minecraft login that I had purchased before the EULA was in place; I’ve avoided their services like the plague since then.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#44

Post by therobots927 »

Fun fact, if someone knows your email address and clicks “forgot my password” it sends a push notification to the Gmail and YouTube apps asking to confirm or deny the sign in request. They can click that hundreds or thousands of times per day. I know because it happened to me, so I moved all of my accounts off of the email and deleted my YouTube account. :) peace out Google. Thanks for tolerating a completely insane UI, and not allowing me to turn this setting off. I can’t imagine what it’s like for the elderly who have to navigate this completely enshitified landscape.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#46

Post by cedws »

saint_yossarian wrote: post #20
cedws wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email services in general. My worst nightmare is my email provider (which isn't Google) going dark and losing access to everything.

You can use a custom domain with most providers, so when they go dark you can at least migrate to another one.

Two things about fronting with your own domain:

1. You have to own that domain forever, until or at least until you're 100% confident that an email intended for you will never be sent to that domain ever again. Even then, there are security risks with giving up the domain.

2. You give up some privacy. You can use mailbox aliases but it doesn't really matter if all the mailboxes are tied to a domain registered to your name and address.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#47

Post by TechRemarker »

Wow this is massive, but will come down to whether you switch to another existing address you have. That is you have example1@gmail.com and example2@gmail.com. The first one has all your decades of data and second is name you've reserved etc. With handles you can release one and use on another account so hopefully option to do the same. Or if they could just update their account migration to support migrating all historic data that would accomplish the same.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#48

Post by makeitdouble »

HocusLocus wrote: post #23
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm interesting, do you want to tell why this helps out a lot perhaps?

;) I was a by-invitation-beta in 2004, trust me. Even then spammers knew about the +1234 trick too. The earliest throwaway forwarders suffered from explosive growth and spam netblocks and their queue times varied greatly. The golden age of Viagra and recruiters selling prospect lists to randos. I retreated to gmail for the SPOP and because my original address was Tech Contact for 100+ domains from 1994-2000. Thousand…

Don't you get these spam mails either way ?

I have a separate email I only use to get government and public services (gas, electricity) stuff and it still receives a few hundreds of spam a week. At this point I kinda feel whitelisting the mail I want to read is the only sane option, so getting hundreds or thousands of spam mail makes little difference, while managing a portofolio of addresses is a chore.

Re: Google is 'gradually rolling out' option to change your gmail.com address

#49

Post by cedws »

firefax wrote: post #18
cedws wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email services in general. My worst nightmare is my email provider (which isn't Google) going dark and losing access to everything.

If you use a password manager like Keepass, you should still be able to log into your other accounts if you lost access and at least with financial institutions you can call, ask that no changes be made with without coming into the branch and showing ID.

Yes, but many companies will also drag their feet, refuse for "security reasons", or you'll just never be able to reach them in the first place because their only support is an AI concierge that tells you the same thing over and over.

As an example Anthropic and OpenAI don't let you change your email address.

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