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Ask HN: do you use theirdomain@yourdomain.com when registering accounts?
I don't know if there is a name for the practice, but when I register a new account somewhere I tend to sign up with the email address foo@mydomain.com where foo = their domain minus the TLD.
Recently it's helped me see that a large email marketing firm has been hacked as many versions of the same spam message have arrived in my inbox sent to specific email addresses. It also prevents some of the cross-federated identity detection some "services" like RapLeaf try to do.
However, it becomes a pain with Gravatar, single sign on and places where email addresses have a provenance.
On that last point, I recently signed up for Qwiki, using the email address qwiki@mydomain.com. I also decided to sign up my girlfriend as well. Long story short, she got an invite and I didn't. :(
If Qwiki used any social media tools to discover "valuableness" of a given user from their email address, hers would have had great provenance and mine would have nothing.
- madhouse 16y agoI use a variant of this, I sign up with myusername+uniqueid@mydomain.org, where uniqueid is something I will later recognise, often a shortened version of the target domain name. This has the advantage of being easy to filter and see where from a particular message originated from, and at the same time, it does contain my username, which makes it easier to search for me.
- lurchpop 16y agosure everyone knows this already, but gmail allows YourGmailAccountName+TheirDomain@gmail.com I'd love to see people share stories and name names of companies they've caught spamming using this technique. I just noticed that facebook won't validate if you try the "+" gmail alias.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- frobozz 16y agoLots of sites declare + to be an invalid character in email addresses. It's rather frustrating.
- dotBen 16y agoI have just discovered loads of 'top companies' and startups sending me spam based on this vector, but it turns out their email marketing list provider was hacked.