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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

#71

Post by sbf501 »

gpm wrote: post #23

Maybe not 3rd party spam, but definitely first party spam. I gave a custom username email to a in-person store (big chain) with a rewards program because they were offering a huge discount if you did. Since then they've sent at least 1 email a day, with an average of about two (I've redirected all their emails to a folder I never look at). Which is a particularly remarkably obnoxious rate of sending emails... I've al…

I wasn't counting 1st party spam as spam because in many cases I like the information I get (usually sales on things I buy). I should have pointed that out in my post. Thanks for making the distinction.

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

#72

Post by TheJoeMan »

sbf501 wrote: post #65
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! :|

But you’ve stumbled on an even better solution! Now you are spam free + tracking free.

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

#73

Post by sbf501 »

nickhalfasleep wrote: post #19

Donate to a political candidate or large non-profit. Those are where I see the most sharing of addresses. I have been doing the same sort of custom emails.

I should have specified that it was only retail, not social media or politics.

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

#74

Post by bdamm »

luminousbit wrote: post #44

I too have done this for almost years and it's magical. So easy to see who has been compromised. Also a great protection against phishing because "You need to update your Capital One password" that isn't addressed to "capitalone@mydomain.com" is an instant red flag.

I've been doing it for 20 years. Yes, or conversely, seeing "You need to update your Capital One password" being sent to my custom addresses for AAA, Telecom, Linkedin, etc.

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

#75

Post by aspyct »

sbf501 wrote: post #65
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! :|

On the other hand, your address is being filtered out, so... win? :D

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

#78

Post by denton-scratch »

ziddoap wrote: post #24
bombcar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compromises are 99% of those I see (similar setup) - the last 1% is acquired companies that have pivoted/do something else. It's not quite spam, it's not quite illegitimate, but it's not what I signed up for.

> 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?

No,I don't think so. If you signed up to receive email, then it's going to be hard to show that you received email that's different from what you signed-up for. And if it's not Bulk, then it's simply email - not bulk, and not unsolicited.

That's why it's important that spam continues to be defined as Unsolicited Bulk Email.

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

#79

Post by js2 »

Just don’t ever donate to a non-profit or political campaign. There is no unsubscribing, ever. I mean, they have unsubscribe links, but those don’t actually do anything AFAICT.

You also can’t stop them from sending you postal mail.

Fortunately non-profits and politicians are lazy and they all use just a few emailers which you can identify via the headers, so a couple Fastmail rules catch most of it. NGP VAN is the worst offender on the Democratic side, and can be identified by “Return-Path:” contains “bounce.myngp.com”.

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

#80

Post by zndr »

OrangeMonkey wrote: post #5

I'm glad you had a good experience. I had a different one. I've ran my own domain for longer than you have, and many emails have been compromised. Some are 100% from companies selling the emails to sister companies. The majority, though, is from a company itself being compromised by hackers / database access / etc. LinkedIn, Neopets, ProFlowers, TeeSpring, etc. I can go on.

Seconding this.

And to compound this after doing a half ass job of what OP has done, I recently moved my custom google apps free domain to have a second reception domain i use JUST for this with a `.email` TLD (side note: the amount of tools that don't see modern TLD's as valid is enraging)>

I made the (maybe poor) choice of donating to political campaigns before the last US election using these emails

- `Biden-campaign@` - `democrats@` - `All of those I've had to unsubscribe from about 2-3 dozen total OTHER email lists as those emails are literally sold/given out to other campaigns. the biden one being the worst.

Also if you have your own business you'll start getting solicitations, LOTS of solicitations. And god forbid your email is on an old resume, or somewhere else.

Now, is any of this "technically" spam? Maybe but not really. Do I consider it worthless? yes.

But to site your last specific one. I did a search for an address I know was on a compromised product. Specifically a game Heroes of Newerth. They were hacked in I believe 2015 and the list was sold. My email was my old method `name+hon@email.domain`. I get like 20~ emails to that a year and all of them go to spam or are flagged as spam automatically.

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