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How do you guys do this? IS there a service? Do you add na.melast@gmail Or do you create them on your own domain through the hosting company?
by inputcoffee 10y ago
How do you guys do this?
IS there a service? Do you add na.melast@gmail
Or do you create them on your own domain through the hosting company?
- lobster_johnson 10y agoI use Fastmail, which provides very nice wildcard aliasing under a domain. *@mydomain goes to a single inbox. I can also create specific aliases such as foo@mydomain.
- whateverdudes 10y agoIt's often called plus addressing. Quite a common feature in mail servers and mail services. MyName+<any-random-text> at gmail.com ends up in MyName's mailbox.
- apetresc 10y agoDoesn't that defeat the purpose? Surely anyone savvy enough to be dealing in black-market e-mail address lists is savvy enough to just remove everything after the + sign?
- dastbe 10y agoYou never use the bare address. If it gets stripped then it gets binned.
- paulgb 10y agoWhat do 'bare address', 'stripped', and 'binned' mean in this context?
- mod 10y agoI don't agree with him, but he means you never use the email address without a "+service" in it. Then, if the spammer strips (removes) that part, it gets sent to the trash (binned).
- gruez 10y agoWorks well until you encounter a service that thinks you can't have pluses in emails
- whateverdudes 10y agoProbably yes. The software I'm using supports configuring the character per domain, so I can use say . instead of +, so I could use myname.service@example.com which I assume would solve that.
- rrdharan 10y agoYou can use anything after a + character with Gmail. E.g. myaddress+service1@gmail.com will go to your inbox and you can filter on it.
- ng12 10y agoI'd image most shady spammers would know enough to filter out the +.
- joezydeco 10y agoBut not every website out there allows you to enter this as a valid email address. My earlier hypothesis was that this was on purpose, to make sure you don't use a filter on any email they might send. But these days I'm tending to think it's just a bad regexp on their side.
- discreditable 10y agoEven worse, some sites let you enter a plus address initially but that address will not work in some account management pages. I had an instance where I signed up to a pizza place with such an address and I could not unsubscribe or edit my mail preferences because of it.
- vangale 10y agoFor example, overstock.com. Their registration page lets you use '+' address, but their login page forbids it.
- chucksmash 10y agoIf you are just starting to do this...it's very easy to forget you did it for a particular site. "I can't log in and to boot your site says there is no account matching first.last@gmail.com. What kind of Mickey Mouse operation are you running here?" "Sir, you are an idiot."
- mattdotc 10y ago
- rexfm 10y agoI use a catch-all (*@mydomain.tld), and forward everything to the same place. Really simple and I can just make up email addresses on the fly when I need to, no config necessary, and harder to reverse than the +addresses trick.
- paulgb 10y agoI have a wildcard redirect so that <anything>@mydomain.com is forwarded to me. That way whenever I sign up for a service I just use, e.g., dropbox@mydomain.com.
- astrostl 10y agoI used that practice, and ended up selling the domain. Updating everything was an absolute nightmare as a result, and I couldn't make a simple request like, "please forward my one primary email address to me for the next few years." YMMV :)
- corobo 10y agoDon't sell your domain until you've done a search for "to:*@example.com" :)
- auganov 10y agoPersonally, I worry much more about ad-hoc stalkers or angry people doing semi-manual digging. Such a scheme wouldn't help much. Does anyone know a convenient pipeline for managing (receiving, creating, disposing of etc) 3-rd party email accounts?
- nialv7 10y agoHave email on you own domain is risky unless you active manage it. Otherwise forget to renew your domain once, all your credentials are gone...
- lorenzhs 10y agoYou definitely need to remember to renew it, but a yearly repeating event in your calendar should be sufficient. That's hardly "active management".
- macintux 10y agoThere is such a service: 33mail.com. I've just signed up.
- gdelfino01 10y agoFor gmail, you can also put a period "." anywhere and it still works.