4 ms·

I just started generating random addresses and putting them in password manager. The actionable bit is permanently black-holing all incoming mail to that addres

I just started generating random addresses and putting them in password manager. The actionable bit is permanently black-holing all incoming mail to that address if/when I no longer need the service, or the "spam" rate gets too high.

joekrill 6y ago
I use gmail, so I just use the "Report as spam" option. I'm assuming Google uses that information in some way when calculating spam scores. So if enough people do the same, those emails will just start getting sent to spam automatically for huge amounts of people, and therefore punishing those folks for doing it in the first place. That seems more effective to me. And I just never really had that big of an issue with spam where I needed to black-hole a specific email address. So for me it just wasn't worth the effort.
- rootlocus 6y ago
  People using "report as spam" is what made gmail such a great spam filter. Is also the reason google has such high market share of public email addresses. It's also why people running their own mail servers are afraid of being blacklisted by google.
- newsbinator 6y ago
  Yesterday I used the report as spam feature on an email from Microsoft. The footer had no unsubscribe option and the "manage communication preferences" requires a login/password combo that I couldn't be bothered to reset for my new geolocation. I doubt this'll make a dent in Microsoft.com's spam score.
developer2 6y ago
More than 3 years ago I moved from a single gmail address that had a ton of spam, to a Fastmail wildcard domain with a rule for each individual/company that emails me. I use a randomly generated, 7-character username created from a-z and 0-9 for each address, stored in my password manager. eg. The email address for my Reddit account might be rkd64id@example.com. While I think this scheme is perfection in terms of privacy and security in knowing which company sells or breaches my email address... the fact is I haven't gotten a single unsolicited email in the entire 3+ years. Not a single message that hit a spam/junk filter, and not one email that wasn't expected based on whitelisted rules. The closest exception is Amazon who shares your email address with their shippers for delivery notifications; while I do receive 3rd party mail regarding legitimate Amazon deliveries, I've never received any spam to that Amazon address. I have come to a conclusion as to why I have never received a single spam email since switching to this scheme. When I transitioned my GitHub account away from the old gmail address, I used the privacy option to not publish my REAL email address in Git logs pushed to GitHub. I deleted my old repos, and re-imported using the GitHub-wrapped email address. Thus I surmise that for those of us who are developers pushing code to public Git repositories, the vast majority of the spam you receive is because your email address can be very easily scraped from those Git logs. I expect to migrate back to a single email address in the future, for a singular reason: as I get older I cannot imagine managing these email filters and password manager entries. Eventually I will need to simplify things.

joekrill 6y ago

I use gmail, so I just use the "Report as spam" option. I'm assuming Google uses that information in some way when calculating spam scores. So if enough people do the same, those emails will just start getting sent to spam automatically for huge amounts of people, and therefore punishing those folks for doing it in the first place. That seems more effective to me. And I just never really had that big of an issue with spam where I needed to black-hole a specific email address. So for me it just wasn't worth the effort.

rootlocus 6y ago
People using "report as spam" is what made gmail such a great spam filter. Is also the reason google has such high market share of public email addresses. It's also why people running their own mail servers are afraid of being blacklisted by google.
newsbinator 6y ago
Yesterday I used the report as spam feature on an email from Microsoft. The footer had no unsubscribe option and the "manage communication preferences" requires a login/password combo that I couldn't be bothered to reset for my new geolocation. I doubt this'll make a dent in Microsoft.com's spam score.

developer2 6y ago

More than 3 years ago I moved from a single gmail address that had a ton of spam, to a Fastmail wildcard domain with a rule for each individual/company that emails me. I use a randomly generated, 7-character username created from a-z and 0-9 for each address, stored in my password manager. eg. The email address for my Reddit account might be rkd64id@example.com. While I think this scheme is perfection in terms of privacy and security in knowing which company sells or breaches my email address... the fact is I haven't gotten a single unsolicited email in the entire 3+ years. Not a single message that hit a spam/junk filter, and not one email that wasn't expected based on whitelisted rules. The closest exception is Amazon who shares your email address with their shippers for delivery notifications; while I do receive 3rd party mail regarding legitimate Amazon deliveries, I've never received any spam to that Amazon address. I have come to a conclusion as to why I have never received a single spam email since switching to this scheme. When I transitioned my GitHub account away from the old gmail address, I used the privacy option to not publish my REAL email address in Git logs pushed to GitHub. I deleted my old repos, and re-imported using the GitHub-wrapped email address. Thus I surmise that for those of us who are developers pushing code to public Git repositories, the vast majority of the spam you receive is because your email address can be very easily scraped from those Git logs. I expect to migrate back to a single email address in the future, for a singular reason: as I get older I cannot imagine managing these email filters and password manager entries. Eventually I will need to simplify things.