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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

#61

Post by dspillett »

csdvrx wrote: post #46
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 When it happens, I say "this is because your company is so important to me that it has its own mailbox to be prioritized accordingly" It worked every single time :)

Same, though go with “I use the incoming address name to file things into the right folder, so work things, banking things, shopping, and such, are separated” – I don't butter them up by making them sound important enough that I created a mail inbox just for them.

If they still object then I don't sign up. I've had web form refuse to accept an email address with their company name in, so that sale went elsewhere, and one physical retail store wouldn't let me sign up to their prize draw with such an address, so I didn't. In neither case do I suspect anything of value was lost by myself!

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

#62

Post by thewebcount »

bombcar wrote: post #27
ziddoap wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not quite spam, it's not quite illegitimate, but it's not what I signed up for. If it's not what you signed up for, isn't that pretty much the definition of spam?

You usually sign up for "company updates" or some such nomenclature, but after Bob's Discount Swords pivots to Improved Plowshares™, it's not really relevant anymore. Then again, I actually fill out that little question after unsubscribing. The above I consider "legit" as long as unsubscribe works.

In my experience, you don't sign up for anything, but are automatically added to mailing lists against your will just for the sin of purchasing something. I never want to get emails from any company just because I purchased 1 item from them. Most people I know tell me they feel the same way, but instead of unsubscribing, they just mark it as spam and eventually it stops showing up in their inbox.

If I want emails from you, I will explicitly ask to be added to your mailing list. Anything else is spam as far as I'm concerned.

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

#63

Post by vinay_ys »

Email is a lot less valuable these days, exactly because of how good the spam/categorization filters have become – huge kudos to gmail for this.

Phone number on the other hand – it is a nightmare – how every service (office front desk, apartment front desk, car wash, restaurant, barbershop etc) takes your phone number and uploads it to some spam database and then you get so many spam sms and calls.

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

#65

Post by sbf501 »

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…

> Placing a companies name in the address will signal a canary and they may likely filter

Oh, good point. I guess I may have invalidated all my research! :|

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

#66

Post by jonathankoren »

Ironically, my "spam-magnet" email doesn't get spam, but my "official" email gets tons of spam. It started out with people that bought my email address specifically to spam a different person with my name. Now I also get generic spam, probably as a result of scraping it from my pdf resume.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

johnklos wrote: post #57

Let's consider a few things: 1) Just because it hasn't happened to you, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I have quite a few examples of companies selling or otherwise sharing, whether intentionally or through compromise, my email addresses. 2) If someone (some company) is going to sell email addresses, it's not unreasonable to imagine that they'd want to remove any addresses that would directly link those address…

[deleted]
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