5 ms·

As people said, true spammers know to just strip off the "+" in the email address. This is actually a fun reason to set up your own domain and set up email for

• judge2020 5y ago
  Note that you should only do this for maybe 6-18 characters, some sites will test send an email to [30-100 character random string]@example.com and see if it bounces - if it doesn't, it'll suspect that domain to be some spammer with a catch-all email inbox and block it.
  • alufers 5y ago
    Do you know what sites do that? I have my own domain and I haven't seen anybody do that. The obvious solution is to configure your mail server to only accept usernames before the '@' that adhere to some rule which only you know. Like checking if it is a palindrome or something obscure like this.
  • bbarnett 5y ago
    I watch multiple corp's mail logs extensively, this is not even remotely a common thing. Worse, I know at least 5 or 6 people personally, which do catch all. It seems like a very poor method to reliably catch spammers.
  • jasonjayr 5y ago
    That's a terrible approach, plenty of valid, legitimate non-spamming domains use catchalls of arbitrary length for all sorts of reasons. Additionally, sending a test email like that might also get the sender placed on a black list for triggering a spam trap inadvertently.
  • pmontra 5y ago
    That's a worrying strategy because there are many reasons for using a catchall. Example: one email per site to track companies selling personal data, then maybe bounce that single email address. Do you know any site blocking domains with a catchall?
    • LorenPechtel 5y ago
      Yeah, if you have a domain of your own the sensible thing is a catchall, use a different address everywhere and block the ones that spam.
  • megous 5y ago
    Max local part size is 64 octets. So 100 chars would be out of spec.
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  > So I'll use amazon@example.com when signing up at Amazon I go a little farther. I figure an attentive spammer might figure out that if I use amazon@johnsmith.net to sign up for Amazon, I may have exactly the scheme where *@johnsmith.net will work, so they can just add that to the spam list as a wildcard and pick a new address every time. So instead, I use john101@johnsmith.net, john102, john103, etc, to try and obscure my strategy and prolong the life of the domain forwarding.
  • willcipriano 5y ago
    I just have a entire domain for the purposes of spam. Anything sent to there ends up in my bulk folder. I use amazon@domain.com so I can tell who sells my email or gets hacked. Never noticed someone trying to send a email to any addresses I haven't previously used.
    • wastholm 5y ago
      > Never noticed someone trying to send a email to any addresses I haven't previously used. At least a few years ago, I noticed a lot of spam to <random first name>@<my domain> -- i.e., completely made-up addresses that I had never used. Since messages sent to those addresses were guaranteed to be spam, I started treating them as free training data for the spam filter. I don't know if this still happens, though, because I haven't looked.
      • Grollicus 5y ago
        This is currently happening to my email domain. Gets rejected as it doesn't have a valid hash (recipient name), but the logfiles are full of <3 letters>@mydomain.com and <english_word>@mydomain.com rejections.
        • klyrs 5y ago
          Yeah, this is an age-old issue -- in the early 00s, my mom got a domain and used the email <first_initial>@<domain>.com. She gave up battling the deluge of spam after about a year. We looked through the logs, and saw that her next choice of handle was also getting tons of spam, too, because it was also short.
• em-bee 5y ago
  well, you could turn it around and use + addresses everywhere, so that any legitimate response must be to one of your + addresses. then treat anything without + as spam.
• academia_hack 5y ago
  The + is also useful for knowing who sold your email address on or was responsible for a data breach. If I start getting spam to <my name>+hulu@gmail.com, then I know I could chase down Hulu on Twitter for an explanation.
• zzo38computer 5y ago
  I do a similar thing, except that the email is actually hosted at my domain rather than being forwarded, and that I have a list of email addresses that I accept and reject all others; if I receive too much spam at one address, I disable receiving at that address. I have found this to work; I hardly receive any spam at all, and do not need any separate spam filter.
• progforlyfe 5y ago
  Although hardly anyone uses yahoo mail anymore, they actually have this feature built in. Basically email aliases.
• frereubu 5y ago
  Didn't you find you got a deluge of spam to generic addresess like admin@, info@, offers@ and so on? I tried this, although it was probably about 15 years ago now, and reverted it because I got about the same amount of spam as genuine emails.
• shard 5y ago
  That makes me want to use an email address of the form +myname@mydomain.com, just to see how websites would handle stripping out everything starting from the +.
• unanswered 5y ago
  I've run into at least one domain that blocks their own name in your email; that was fun.