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>you can target them on Quora, Reddit etc as well. This is one of the reasons I stopped giving out my primary email address for user signups. I use a service c

by spsful 6y ago

>you can target them on Quora, Reddit etc as well. This is one of the reasons I stopped giving out my primary email address for user signups. I use a service called Blur which allows for unlimited "masked" emails to be created, allowing me to give companies read-only email addresses. In the four years I've had it I have created 378 email addresses. If I'm including the email addresses that I've already deleted, the list gets to 400. Marketing and the 3000 spam messages I get per month made me do this. It does not have to be this way, but as long as corporations can play fast and loose with my email address I will make sure they never get a real one to begin with. Edit: Want to add here that I am not in any way sponsored by that company, I've just been using them for years now and think their prices are reasonable.

elorant 6y ago
Care to provide a link for the service you're using?
- feistypharit 6y ago
  He means https://www.abine.com/ https://www.abine.com/. personally, I use https://33mail.com/ https://33mail.com/. If you want to go full fake, check out https://mysudo.com/ https://mysudo.com/.
- Shorn 6y ago
  I run https://kopi.cloud https://kopi.cloud - let's you give out burner addresses you can just make up on the fly. SSO through Google, Facebook, Twitter. One touch blocking of burner addresses. Supports replying and attachments. Mail 2 RSS - read Facebook / StackOverflow, newsletters, etc. as RSS feeds. And you can use your own domain if you want, so no lock-in.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Once the marketers discover people are doing this, they'll ban email addresses from this service as if they were fraudulent. Wouldn't be surprised if companies started disallowing everything except gmail.
- rootsudo 6y ago
  They already do.
- prawn 6y ago
  Gmail is where most of my form spam comes from!
mceachen 6y ago
If you're using gmail, plus-suffixing is a low-effort but effective countermeasure: username+servicename@gmail.com gets delivered to username@gmail.com.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I have about a 20% failure rate where email address validation fields reject the + character
  - gingerlime 6y ago
    and knowing it's gmail, it's trivial now for the company to simply drop the +... part and store/use your real email address.
  - mceachen 6y ago
    Ah. You can set up dash-suffixing if you're using a custom domain with gmail. Create a new "catch-all" email account. Log into that new catch-all account, and create forwarding rules for alice-* to go to alice@example.com, bob-* to go to bob@example.com, ... I've done this for more than a decade.
buzzert 6y ago
I registered a domain name that’s basically just a UUID, and pointed it’s MX records to my self-hosted email server (you could also point it to Google Apps or Fastmail). Everything before the UUID domain is just the name of the service, so something like hackernews@e913ff00...xyz. If someone sells out my email address, I can instantly burn it by just adding a sieve rule since they’re all unique. I even know who sold it based on what name I picked before the @ symbol. This has been working out pretty well for me so far.
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  I heard that some services have started rejecting email addresses that contain their name.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    How hard would it be to set up a SQLite database or use a simple cipher?
  - ulucs 6y ago
    For websites that have questionable password policy, I use passwords that curse the company in my native language (if no-one sees it then it's fine, but if someone does then they have deserved it). I bet the same tactic would work if you get creative, ie spotfuckingify@uuid
  - Macha 6y ago
    Oh no, I can't have google@mydomain, guess I have to have goog@mydomain or ggle@mydomain or meggl@mydomain
- newscracker 6y ago
  Looks like a nice idea, since I’ve pondered about getting a name that’s not really meaningful or connected to my identities. 1. What’s the length of the UUID that you use? 2. Haven’t you encountered forms that have shorter email address length limits? 3. Also, wouldn’t such a domain be seen as a spammer/scammer when machine learning starts taking over signup/registration systems?

by spsful 6y ago

elorant 6y ago

Care to provide a link for the service you're using?

feistypharit 6y ago
He means https://www.abine.com/ https://www.abine.com/. personally, I use https://33mail.com/ https://33mail.com/. If you want to go full fake, check out https://mysudo.com/ https://mysudo.com/.
Shorn 6y ago
I run https://kopi.cloud https://kopi.cloud - let's you give out burner addresses you can just make up on the fly. SSO through Google, Facebook, Twitter. One touch blocking of burner addresses. Supports replying and attachments. Mail 2 RSS - read Facebook / StackOverflow, newsletters, etc. as RSS feeds. And you can use your own domain if you want, so no lock-in.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

Once the marketers discover people are doing this, they'll ban email addresses from this service as if they were fraudulent. Wouldn't be surprised if companies started disallowing everything except gmail.

rootsudo 6y ago
They already do.
prawn 6y ago
Gmail is where most of my form spam comes from!

mceachen 6y ago

If you're using gmail, plus-suffixing is a low-effort but effective countermeasure: username+servicename@gmail.com gets delivered to username@gmail.com.

hinkley 6y ago
I have about a 20% failure rate where email address validation fields reject the + character
- gingerlime 6y ago
  and knowing it's gmail, it's trivial now for the company to simply drop the +... part and store/use your real email address.
- mceachen 6y ago
  Ah. You can set up dash-suffixing if you're using a custom domain with gmail. Create a new "catch-all" email account. Log into that new catch-all account, and create forwarding rules for alice-* to go to alice@example.com, bob-* to go to bob@example.com, ... I've done this for more than a decade.

buzzert 6y ago

I registered a domain name that’s basically just a UUID, and pointed it’s MX records to my self-hosted email server (you could also point it to Google Apps or Fastmail). Everything before the UUID domain is just the name of the service, so something like hackernews@e913ff00...xyz. If someone sells out my email address, I can instantly burn it by just adding a sieve rule since they’re all unique. I even know who sold it based on what name I picked before the @ symbol. This has been working out pretty well for me so far.

dependenttypes 6y ago
I heard that some services have started rejecting email addresses that contain their name.
- hinkley 6y ago
  How hard would it be to set up a SQLite database or use a simple cipher?
- ulucs 6y ago
  For websites that have questionable password policy, I use passwords that curse the company in my native language (if no-one sees it then it's fine, but if someone does then they have deserved it). I bet the same tactic would work if you get creative, ie spotfuckingify@uuid
- Macha 6y ago
  Oh no, I can't have google@mydomain, guess I have to have goog@mydomain or ggle@mydomain or meggl@mydomain
newscracker 6y ago
Looks like a nice idea, since I’ve pondered about getting a name that’s not really meaningful or connected to my identities. 1. What’s the length of the UUID that you use? 2. Haven’t you encountered forms that have shorter email address length limits? 3. Also, wouldn’t such a domain be seen as a spammer/scammer when machine learning starts taking over signup/registration systems?