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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

#81

Post by denton-scratch »

thewebcount wrote: post #62
bombcar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fro…

> just for the sin of purchasing something

Ah: prior commercial relationship. That's not spam, unless they ignore your unsubscribe request.

I hope you're not notifying the world that your preferred supplier of [X] is a spammer. I like to stay on good terms with my preferred suppliers.

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

#84

Post by Brian_K_White »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
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.

Similar here. I don't recall when I started doing it, but it's been at least 20 years. I get a fair amount of spam from "well, what did you expect?" addresses (social sites, mostly) and some from addresses that are hard to pin down (paypal address might be shared to a seller; amazon address is definitely shared to sellers). The most surprising one is ongoing spam (and semi-legitimate contacts from recruiters) to an a…

I'd love a wall of shame that collected all these bad examples.

It would have to somehow be protected against bad actors scrubbing themselves by any other means than no longer being bad actors.

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

#85

Post by MrPatan »

Similar experience here, although I have only been doing it for about a year or two.

I have received exactly one spam email where I could identify who sold the db (or maybe it was leaked and they haven't owned up yet).

Most of the spam I receive is to an address I used before that leaked in some hack a while ago, so that one is truly for sale everywhere at this point.

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

#86

Post by WithinReason »

kibwen wrote: post #49
jack_riminton wrote: post #47

A simpler way to do this is to append the company name to whatever gmail you're using e.g. if my email is bob@gmail.com you could use bob+amazon@gmail.com. No matter what you put after the '+' it'll still get sent to you

The problem is that plenty of poorly-coded signup forms reject the plus character as invalid within an email address.

It's also easy to strip with a regex

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

#89

Post by bambax »

I do the same and it's true that those receive little spam. Not zero however; I just received minutes ago spam that was sent to britishairways@ for example.

The bigest spam magnet is the email address one leaves with a registrar; that is horrible.

Then come contact@, webmaster@, and other generic accounts that spammers can guess for each domain.

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

#90

Post by denton-scratch »

btkthrowaway1 wrote: post #58
ryanlitalien wrote: post #52

I use an alternate spam filter process. I use a "+" sign in my gmail address. So I would subscribe to a promotion/giveaway with username+company@gmail.com. This is a great way to catch which promotion/company sells your email address to unwanted companies. Caveat, sometimes an unsubscribe website can't handle the "+" symbol in an email and you'll continue to get spam. So, just add a filter for that "TO" email to forw…

What's stopping websites from just removing '+company' from 'username+company@gmail.com' and emailing you at 'username@gmail.com'? Even if the website you provide it to doesn't do that. Anyone who buys it can. I'm guessing the answer is, "Most companies are too lazy", but that seems like a weak behavior to depend on.

My guess is that they're too dumb to send marketing emails to people who are obviously taking trouble to NOT receicve marketing emails.

Sending emails to everyone on the planet is one thing; but taking pains to send emails to people who are clearly trying to dodge them seems terminally stupid, and I'd fire anyone who was trying to spend my money on an effort like that.

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