5 ms·

At the cost of manual effort or setting up a script (for registrars/mail providers with decent APIs), you can just use normal email aliases at a domain you own.

by xoa 5y ago

At the cost of manual effort or setting up a script (for registrars/mail providers with decent APIs), you can just use normal email aliases at a domain you own. That's what I do, most sites I register at get some sort of "sitetld_account@mydomain.com" alias. That's pretty portable, lots and lots of email providers (including standard "included with registration" ones at registrars like gandi.net) support essentially unlimited aliases (not like even tens of thousands of them represent any significant resource usage, they all ultimately feed to a single email account with said account's limits on storage and sending). I own the domain so I can point it wherever, and I can just copy/paste the entire list of aliases around. Again that is more manual effort, though I don't consider it much effort given that I'm only signing up for a limited number of sites per year. And I suppose a little extra friction in one respect isn't even that bad a thing, makes me think a bit about whether I do actually want to sign up there. Ideally I'd like to see more efforts about making such things standardized across providers so that even regular people can get the benefits from near any registrar or email provider at all with whatever tooling they like. I guess that's probably either infeasible, or if it happens it'll be out of a rise of competing centralized masking providers raising the issue high enough in the general consciousness that demand drives it. If there are any existing open efforts around that I'd be delighted to know about them though!

distances 5y ago
If you own the domain, you can just point the MX records to Fastmail/whatever and register to all the different service with, say, service@mydomain.com or you@service.mydomain.com. No need to set up the addresses or aliases, you can just make them up as you go and deliver everything for mydomain to your inbox.
piaste 5y ago
If you already have a custom email domain (which is a good idea for the usual portability reasons) _and_ you pick an email provider that supports 'catch-all mailboxes', you can make it entirely frictionless. When I sign up for a new service, I register on the spot as e.g. amazon@mydomain.com, the mails they send are considered as a 'mistaken sender' and are sent to the catch-all mailbox (which is just my regular mailbox!)
smichel17 5y ago
As a compromise, I use a catchall email adress, so @«my HN handle, without numbers».me comes to my single mailbox. Then I use sieve filtering to sort the emails into folders based on the address they're sent to; if there's no special filing rule, it comes to my inbox. So, when I want to sign up for a new service, I can just pick an email (usually based on the domain name), no setup required (unless I want it to be filled into some particular folder). The downside is that you (and spammers) can* send email to any random address and reach me, but in practice I have not found that to be a problem; I don't actually get spam at addresses which are not posted somewhere online. And it's in your best interest to contact me at a more specific email, because if I ever do get widespread spam, I'll swap the default rule to mark as spam, and only allow specific addresses. I recommend hn+«your handle»@«my domain». On the off chance: I'm moving to NYC soon and am in the job market; feel free to shoot me an email if you're hiring at a company that's solving real problems for humans (not, say, selling ads).
- xoa 5y ago
  Replying to this since it's the highest one at this point, but also a response to @piaste and @distances: I know about catch-all accounts, and more complex wildcard options that can exist. But to me those don't really quite hit all the use cases that site-specific ones do when it comes to spam and such, and I have seen emails get leaked from hacks or just plain "we share only with trusted 3rd parties!" buried somewhere. And I suspect if they become popular enough it's only a matter of time before spammers add some sort of "this looks like a catch-all account type email, try sending random stuff" to their logic. On the other hand they are indeed zero friction, so a valid option depending on where in the stack one wants to handle things. The single other significant issue I can think of which has come up actually is when one desires to actually use email for two-way communication with a site, not just receiving stuff. Sending from aliases isn't really practical, spoofing the from address even from the same domain has a high chance of trigger all sorts of spam protection for obvious reasons. I'm sure there is probably some way to handle it from one's own server but that has its own challenges. So sending mail ends up being from a different address as the account, which most places don't seem to care about but seems to hit automated edge cases and snag things up once in a while.

by xoa 5y ago

distances 5y ago

If you own the domain, you can just point the MX records to Fastmail/whatever and register to all the different service with, say, service@mydomain.com or you@service.mydomain.com. No need to set up the addresses or aliases, you can just make them up as you go and deliver everything for mydomain to your inbox.

piaste 5y ago

If you already have a custom email domain (which is a good idea for the usual portability reasons) _and_ you pick an email provider that supports 'catch-all mailboxes', you can make it entirely frictionless. When I sign up for a new service, I register on the spot as e.g. amazon@mydomain.com, the mails they send are considered as a 'mistaken sender' and are sent to the catch-all mailbox (which is just my regular mailbox!)

smichel17 5y ago

As a compromise, I use a catchall email adress, so @«my HN handle, without numbers».me comes to my single mailbox. Then I use sieve filtering to sort the emails into folders based on the address they're sent to; if there's no special filing rule, it comes to my inbox. So, when I want to sign up for a new service, I can just pick an email (usually based on the domain name), no setup required (unless I want it to be filled into some particular folder). The downside is that you (and spammers) can* send email to any random address and reach me, but in practice I have not found that to be a problem; I don't actually get spam at addresses which are not posted somewhere online. And it's in your best interest to contact me at a more specific email, because if I ever do get widespread spam, I'll swap the default rule to mark as spam, and only allow specific addresses. I recommend hn+«your handle»@«my domain». On the off chance: I'm moving to NYC soon and am in the job market; feel free to shoot me an email if you're hiring at a company that's solving real problems for humans (not, say, selling ads).

xoa 5y ago
Replying to this since it's the highest one at this point, but also a response to @piaste and @distances: I know about catch-all accounts, and more complex wildcard options that can exist. But to me those don't really quite hit all the use cases that site-specific ones do when it comes to spam and such, and I have seen emails get leaked from hacks or just plain "we share only with trusted 3rd parties!" buried somewhere. And I suspect if they become popular enough it's only a matter of time before spammers add some sort of "this looks like a catch-all account type email, try sending random stuff" to their logic. On the other hand they are indeed zero friction, so a valid option depending on where in the stack one wants to handle things. The single other significant issue I can think of which has come up actually is when one desires to actually use email for two-way communication with a site, not just receiving stuff. Sending from aliases isn't really practical, spoofing the from address even from the same domain has a high chance of trigger all sorts of spam protection for obvious reasons. I'm sure there is probably some way to handle it from one's own server but that has its own challenges. So sending mail ends up being from a different address as the account, which most places don't seem to care about but seems to hit automated edge cases and snag things up once in a while.