This is a great idea that I had never thought of. Something that might help, if it does actually make a person feel awkward, is to use a numeric code. That way, you could be commercial301@mydomain.com and then 301 could equal Gap, or whatever you want.
Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
81–90 of 304 posts
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#82After the dotcom bust, it was sometimes the user information which was the only thing left to sell off (even when they promised not to.) Spam was more of a problem back then, or maybe just being able to avoid it was more of a problem. So catch all email like this was actually beneficial but it became obvious only a few years later, to me at least, that no one was selling email addresses anymore and all that management was unnecessary overhead. I'd say about by 2006 it had definitely sorted itself out.
I now route mail by context and only deal with maybe a half dozen accounts regularly.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#83For weeks our Shopify app was getting rejected because "you cannot use the Shopify name or trademark in your app". It wasn't... repeated requests for clarification just got back the same form response. After a several frustrating back-and-forths, finally someone at Shopify said "check your email address". The developer contact email address we had submitted, which was only used for shopify us communication and no cus…
I wonder what they'd have said about tobias.luetke@ourdomain.com
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#84I've been doing this for close to a decade and sometimes salespeople and customer service people will ask to confirm, but that takes 5 seconds and isn't awkward (in my opinion.) It has more benefits than knowing who leaked your email, it lets you easily filter your incoming email by who you gave the email to, and when your email is leaked it lets you shut off that email address. Of course you can also filter your ema…
I use 33mail.com (33m.co) for this which gives you a personal subdomain for free, or a private domain on the paid plan. I'm on the (super cheap) paid plan due to mail volume, but haven't found the need for using a personal domain.
I find it zero effort having a unique email address per site, and when combined with unique (algorithmic) password gives effectively a unique identity per site (cookie sharing aside, but there are solutions for that.)
As a result, I have been able to call out a couple of sites for data breaches, and continue to see npm spam in particular. Worst offender so far is Pipedream, an absolute embarrassment for their CEO who appears to have initiated the data scrape. I won't be surprised to see them sued out of existence, which is a shame, as I like the service in general.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#85I try to disguise it a little to avoid the awkwardness, and also put the recipient into the subdomain instead of sender name. For example for grubhub I'd do: me@grb.mydomain.com No need to remember anything because it's all in a password manager. I've found this worthwhile, already blocked a couple spammers. You could also go with something fully random, you still get the same benefit. It's easy to look in your email…
Note some services won't even recognize a subdomain email address as valid.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#86reminds me a bit of the family member who owns firstname@lastname.com and can't get random non technical people to believe that their email address domain really is lastname.com "but don't you mean at gmail.co..." no
I used mail@firstname.lastname.name and sometimes even like the op "service"@firstname.lastname.name for some time. This lead into all kinds of trouble, social and technical. Social as in people did not understand why I "owned" "service"@..., why I did not have something like firstname.lastname@t-online.de/web.de/gmx.de/googlemail.de, that a third level domain is even possible, or they did not recognize .name. Techni…
[deleted]
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#87I've been doing this for close to a decade and sometimes salespeople and customer service people will ask to confirm, but that takes 5 seconds and isn't awkward (in my opinion.) It has more benefits than knowing who leaked your email, it lets you easily filter your incoming email by who you gave the email to, and when your email is leaked it lets you shut off that email address. Of course you can also filter your ema…
Moreso, it's good to teach people that valid email address are in fact valid. This part: > Especially since all these companies ask for and verify your cell phone number is true, though. and > The one outlier is political campaigns: they'll share your email till the end of time. Because politicians exempted themselved from anti-spam laws, as they do with most laws.
> Because politicians exempted themselved from anti-spam laws, as they do with most laws.
This was the most puzzling thing to me. The politicians that I saw on TV as adamantly pro-privacy, anti-tracking, who made a lot of sense in everything they were saying -- you contribute a single dollar (because they want to show grassroots support for their pro-individuals campaign) and they IMMEDIATELY give your email and survey responses to everyone in their party, including to state-level campaigns in places across the country.
There was no indication on the donation form that any of my personal details would be used for anything except to show that they had a lot of grassroots supporters.
Not only that, but their emails are so clickbait-ey like "lazyjeff, you are the reason that [hated politician] is destroying democracy."
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#88Certainly people's experiences might vary, but I have only had a couple companies threaten me for using their company name and way more success in just blocking addresses when I get spam-stormed. I agree it's rare, but so annoying when it happens, so it seems easier just to have a catchall.
hn@drewpalmer.com
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#89Dunno if all these gripes are describing a "huge mistake". Some inconvenience, maybe not the best domain/confusion on the naming, and maybe the realizing down the road the threat might not be that big, but you still got to organize and manage your concern with only a few technical steps.
Re: Using a catch-all domain is a mistake
#90I strongly disagree. I've also been using a catch-all domain for more than a decade and giving each sign-up it's own name@mydomain.com. I can remember one small issue. Otherwise it's never been a problem. The problem has been getting marked as spam for running my own mailserver. But it's all worth it in the end.
I agree with you. So many companies end up with absolutely terrible unsubscribe code that just flat out doesn't work[1]. With my own server I can just burn a particular email with one line in a file, or I can block their whole domain. I end up having to do this fairly regularly. I can also choose the message to send in the smtp 5xx error line and so I like to call them names. I know a person never sees it but it make…
Yes, I also have insults in my client_checks file. I enjoy running my own mail server.