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I got sick of companies rejecting email with "+", and bought a domain to use for email (among other reasons). Now I've got a wildcard entry in DNS, so any valid
by SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
I got sick of companies rejecting email with "+", and bought a domain to use for email (among other reasons). Now I've got a wildcard entry in DNS, so any valid local part gets routed to my inbox. So instead of "username+company@example.com" I can do "company@example.com".
- richardwhiuk 5y agoThat causes weird behaviour in places, where they assume the bit before the @ is a "username".
- 8ytecoder 5y agoI've been using an own domain with wildcard emails for many years now. I'm yet to encounter a single scenario of inferred names.
- choward 5y agoI've been using this strategy for years and have not encountered that issue before. That would mean the part before the @ would have to be unique across all domains. That doesn't make any sense. You couldn't have webmaster@domain1.com and webmaster@domain2.com registered for example.
- CydeWeys 5y agoOr ben@gmail.com and ben@hotmail.com couldn't both be registered. This scheme is so obviously flawed I can't imagine it's widely implemented.
- MivLives 5y agoWhat provider do you use for email? That does sound nice.
- tstrimple 5y agoI've tried something similar with Fastmail, and it works out well for the most part. I have ran into more than a couple services which won't accept email addresses not on a whitelisted domain for some reason and I had to use an @gmail.com address which forwards to my domain.
- tmk1108 5y agoOut of curiosity, are those popular services? I'm in process of setting up email on my own domain and it would suck having to fallback to Gmail if some service uses an accepted list of domains.
- bluGill 5y agofastmail is reasonably popular. Gmail is bigger, but fastmail is big enough that they cannot be ignored, unlike when I ran my own personal server and often found myself in blacklists without any knowable way to get off.
- toast0 5y agoI've had a couple places not take my .us domain, but almost everything is fine with my .org. The places I've run into that are really picky don't like gmail or other free email providers. The one exception is Craigslist; if I email someone with my normal email, I never get a response. I always use gmail for that.
- Angostura 5y agoIn the UK, my domain name provider offers free e-mail forwarding for (I think) 10 specific e-mail address, plus a catch-all forwarder for anything else. Works quite well.
- gpm 5y agoI use migadu for this. I also use greg-*@domain instead of *@domain, since their docs claim that setting up *@domain tends to attract more spam.
- nullify88 5y agoAnother Migadu user here slowly degoogling myself. $19 a year is a bargain for my usage and the features I get.
- bluehatbrit 5y agoAlso a migadu user, I'm a huge fan and can't speak highly enough of them. Their pricing model is a perfect fit for me and their support address is really quick to respond.
- _rs 5y agoHuh, how did I not ever hear/find out about this when I was choosing a provider... I think this is the first time I've seen them mentioned on HN, despite searching through quite a few de-googling threads. Will definitely take a closer look!
- fk33 5y agomailbox.org also provides the functionality to use your own domain and a have a wildcard entry, where all emails go into your inbox.
- sammorrowdrums 5y agoI use ProtonMail and sign up to everything with <service>@<custom-domain> so I can track what they do with my email. It's not cheap from PM, and there are loads of hosting providers that will provide catch-all email for free with your hosting package (but with some usually pretty poor webmail client) or if you use a mail client it should work too. I like having good webmail and mail app and other things so I pay, but there are plenty of good options available. Sadly self-hosting email server is not really an option for a variety of reasons, but you should easily be able to use catch-all e-mail addresses.
- 8ytecoder 5y agoFastmail supports it. The best part about fastmail is that you can reply from the same address you got the email for. This is useful in customer service scenarios that identify your account based on email address.
- toast0 5y agoThe reply part is somewhat new. I had to delete and re-add the wildcard to get it on my old (circa 2013) account, but very nice to have
- btmiller 5y agoMy time to shine! https://btmiller.com/2019/12/12/regain-control-over-your-inbox-by-rejecting-email-with-a-custom-domain-wildcard-and-aliases.html https://btmiller.com/2019/12/12/regain-control-over-your-inb...
- xyst 5y agoThe paid version of gmail (google workspace/gsuite) offers this as well (they call it "aliases"). I haven't explored the option myself, but I do recall seeing something like this in the admin panel. Whether they charge for it or not is probably something I should look into. At some point, I need to migrate away from google and build out my own personal mail server.
- fooey 5y agohttps://forwardemail.net/ https://forwardemail.net/ is fantastic if all you want is to forward domains somewhere else. It's a freemium model, but I've never needed anything in the paid tier
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y agoI'm on fastmail.
- ElFitz 5y agoI ended up giving up on that after one too many websites rejecting my custom domain (which I’m the only one using) on signup. These lazy / ignorant colleagues are annoying -_-‘
- bcrosby95 5y agoI've been using a similar scheme for about 7 years now and have never had my email rejected by a website on signup.
- 90minuteAPI 5y agoThe American Kennel Club rejected mine because the domain was “too similar” to their name. I guess just because it had a “kc” in it? Completely bewildering.
- psutor 5y agoI use this scheme (company@mydomain.com) and one that I remember blocking for this reason is Aliexpress/Alibaba - aliexpress@mydomain.com was rejected so I use ali@mydomain.com. No idea what sort of security this is supposed to provide.
- ElFitz 5y agoIt happens rarely, but some only accept a very limited number of domains (ie Gmail, Outlook, etc). They probably see it as some sort of security / anti-spam mechanism.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoI use a .xyz domain for my personal email, and I sort of regret it. My emails have a tendency to become spam filter bycatch, to the point that when I was job hunting last year I'd have to ring people after I sent them my resumes etc. to confirm they actually received my email. And when I give people my email address, I usually have to assure them that steve@stevetech.xyz is a legitimate email address and not a joke (it's not actually steve, but you get the point).
- axaxs 5y agoCan you explain the DNS part? AFAIK the sender just looks for MX on the domain itself, regardless of local part.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoThe actual address in the email header should still contain the subdomain though.
- hug 5y agoThe address "company@example.com" doesn't point to a subdomain, though, the only reference to the company is the local part of the address, and so has nothing to do with DNS. If he said he used "joe@company.example.com", then it's possible he has a wildcard MX record for *.example.com, but that's not at all what he said, although perhaps it's what he meant. Regardless, the question remains unanswered.
- ryandrake 5y agoI just set up my mail server to use - rather than +, and don’t encounter this problem.