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I strictly started handing out "companyname@mypersonaldomain.tld" as email when interacting with companies. That at least makes routing the inevitable spam to t
by Xylakant 9y ago
I strictly started handing out "companyname@mypersonaldomain.tld" as email when interacting with companies. That at least makes routing the inevitable spam to the trash bin slightly easier when a breach occurs. It also provides an indicator of who has (in)voluntarily given away my data.
- Avalyst 9y agoI do the same with Gmail, just add + at the end (As in username+docusign@gmail.com). Of course this has the drawback of some sites being to restrictive with their checks for valid emails and not allowing the + character
- Xylakant 9y agoThe other disadvantage is that it's trivial to infer the true username from that pattern in an automated fashion.
- Avalyst 9y agoYep, it's not foolproof but it's better than nothing. And considering that the number of people using it aren't that many (I guess) spammers wouldn't bother
- corobo 9y agoIf I were a spammer I'd loop through my email address list and strip out + and anything between it and @
- c22 9y agoI've been doing this for awhile. It's especially interesting when giving it to a representative in person, some people will refuse to enter it in their systems. I've also had one webform reject it outright. Lately I've started just using random words to get around this awkwardness and make my pattern less predictable. When I get the first email from that company (often happens within minutes) I just give it the actual company's name as an alias in my client.
- janwillemb 9y agoThey often ask me: do you work for <company> too?
- Xylakant 9y agoor "you can't have that email address, that's our companies name."
- lorenzhs 9y agoAliExpress does this, they don't accept "aliexpress@foo.bar". I suppose it's meant to stop you from providing "foo@aliexpress.com", implemented lazily by rejecting anything that contains the substring "aliexpress". Best response I've received when giving an email address of the form "company@mydoma.in" to a representative in person was "oh you work here too?". The concept of catch-all domains is so foreign to most laypeople that it takes quite some explaining ("I get everything that's sent to any address at that domain", "no it's not expensive at all", "it helps me automatically sort my email").
- user5994461 9y ago>>> I suppose it's meant to stop you from providing "foo@aliexpress.com", implemented lazily by rejecting anything that contains the substring "aliexpress". Most likely it is to stop you from making an address with "aliexpress" in it, so you don't look like affiliated to aliexpress in any way (think: phishing).
- wiredfool 9y ago
- dspillett 9y agoI've done similar with a catch-all sub-domain for years. It does mean that my mail server sees a lot of junk activity as some email lists out there have many addresses in that sub-domain on them, but at least they are easy to filter out. Some sites refuse to accept email addresses with more than one "." after the "@" but I figure if they don't understand email addresses I don't want to be trusting them with my details, even throw-away ones, anyway! Unfortunately I was added to docusign by someone else who gave them my main address...
- homero 9y agoI love their reaction when I say their company name then pause
- fps 9y agoa co-worker got a trademark infringement notice when he used companyname@hisdomain.tld to interact with a particularly litigious software company. They assumed he was a reseller and was representing himself to others using the same email address.
- KirinDave 9y agoYeah, I should stop being lazy and host a personal domain again. It just is such a bad situation these days. Either you: 1. Pay a reasonable rate for a full time server in services that are just truly awful, have no redundancy options, and are associated with a lot of unsavory activity or... 2. You pay a totally unreasonable rate to host it in a more reputable cloud service. 3. You run it out of your home or office and deal with your locale's interent. In my case (California Bay Area) it's bad.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI do the same thing as Xylakant, but my email all goes through gmail (which has its own problems and caveats, but has the advantage of being free beyond the domain name registration.)
- Xylakant 9y agoI host my email at runbox, but many other providers offer catchall on custom domains. No need to host your email yourself.
- e12e 9y agoI do that too, so far Adobe, Dropbox and LinkedIn are my only real sources for spam (due each of these being hacked). And oddly the occasional spam to an alias I used for the crypto-discuss mailing list. One additional twist, I keep my site-spesific aliases on a short sub-domain (for now service-or-tld@s.mytld.com) - if I feel the need in the future I can burn down the whole sub-domain, exchanging s.mytld.com for eg: m.mytld.com.