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I have been using a catchall domain since 2004 and it has been a lifesaver. The sad part is when your email leaks from big companies, you definitely know. I st

I have been using a catchall domain since 2004 and it has been a lifesaver. The sad part is when your email leaks from big companies, you definitely know. I started getting viagra spam delivered to equifax@mydomain.com back in 2007, long before their "big data breach", so it was only a matter of time before that companies pattern of poor security caught up with them. Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody who happens to have your address.

MiddleEndian 4y ago
>Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody who happens to have your address. Ideally, this would also be the case for physical mail. Multiple revokable tokens, not publicly tied to your physical address.
- al_borland 4y ago
  Not having your mailing address tied to your physical address would also have major benefits when people move. Simply update your address with the post office and you're done. The whole idea of revokable tokens would pose an issue for any company that sends bills, as I assume revoking address tokens would be common with them. I'm sure there are many situations like this.
  - r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
    "Simply update your address with the post office and you're done." Welcome to the 19th century! Which is when mail redirection to a new address was introduced in the UK. I'd be amazed if it wasn't around then or earlier in the USA as well. Simply fill out a form and your mail will be redirected for up to two years (albeit at a cost). Or use a PO box and a mail forwarding service which offers filtering of junk mail. I used one for years when I used to move around a lot for less than £100 a year.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      > Welcome to the 19th century! Which is when mail redirection to a new address was introduced in the UK. That’s not the same thing. Everyone still has your old address and you need to update it with them. Not terribly painful if you move once every 5 years. Pretty annoying and error prone if you move every 6 months.
      - r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
        Hence option 2 - the PO box.
        MiddleEndian 4y ago
        I do this, any bureaucratic organization that I want to be able to reach me (very very few) gets my PO box, which has remained the same across three addresses.
        kortilla 4y ago
        Which is rejected as a valid address by many banks, government forms, etc. I want something that the post office guarantees has a real person behind it so I can use it for literally everything that requires an address.
    - al_borland 4y ago
      The US has mail forwarding for 1 year, but that doesn't solve the problem, as you still need to update the source information with all the companies. I usually end up spending several hours changing addresses when I move. It's better to do this right away than to rely on the forwarding completely. Some places get the change of address info automatically and update their records, but it's never the ones you actually want (usually catalogs and marketing mail). A PO box would be fine, but it's not an acceptable address with many businesses, so it's not a universal solution to the problem.
      - MiddleEndian 4y ago
        A workaround for some forms that don't accept PO Boxes: Type something like P0 B0X Type the address of the post office and then the PO Box number like an apartment number
schoen 4y ago
> Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody who happens to have your address. That does seem beneficial for the most part, but do you have ideas about how to handle the use cases like establishing new relationships (what, if anything, do you put on business cards?) or allowing the general public or a broad audience to contact you (what, if anything, do you put in advertisements, on your web site, on slides of a conference presentation, in an e-mail signature on mailing lists?).
- al_borland 4y ago
  The email service Hey (from the makers of Basecamp) has a feature where the first time someone emails you it goes into a screening bucket. You can then approve those senders who are allowed to email you. If you don't approve, you don't see the emails anymore. I initially signed up for the trail when the service launched. The first or second time I went to check the site/app it wasn't working. I was pretty much done with it at that point. I probably should have given it more of a chance and maybe they worked that out, but at $99/year for email my tolerance for issues is pretty low. They did (I suppose still do) have a lot of neat ideas around email though.
  - Dyac 4y ago
    I effectively do this manually in Thunderbird. I have a saved search folder I treat as my "actual inbox" and I only add email addresses I want to receive mail from to the filter rule list.
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  I think it's simply a hybrid approach: you'd handle those unknown contacts with many:1 addresses (since there's no real alternative, as you imply), and you'd handle most known contacts with 1:1 addresses. A benefit is that you might let messages to some or all of those 1:1 addresses be sorted one way (e.g., they ping you) while messages to some or all of the many:1 addresses are sorted another way (e.g., you only check for them with a much longer interval). But then again, a diligently-maintained contact list can be leveraged to achieve same...
test6554 4y ago
Dang, you could trade stocks with information like that.

MiddleEndian 4y ago

>Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody who happens to have your address. Ideally, this would also be the case for physical mail. Multiple revokable tokens, not publicly tied to your physical address.

al_borland 4y ago
Not having your mailing address tied to your physical address would also have major benefits when people move. Simply update your address with the post office and you're done. The whole idea of revokable tokens would pose an issue for any company that sends bills, as I assume revoking address tokens would be common with them. I'm sure there are many situations like this.
- r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
  "Simply update your address with the post office and you're done." Welcome to the 19th century! Which is when mail redirection to a new address was introduced in the UK. I'd be amazed if it wasn't around then or earlier in the USA as well. Simply fill out a form and your mail will be redirected for up to two years (albeit at a cost). Or use a PO box and a mail forwarding service which offers filtering of junk mail. I used one for years when I used to move around a lot for less than £100 a year.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    > Welcome to the 19th century! Which is when mail redirection to a new address was introduced in the UK. That’s not the same thing. Everyone still has your old address and you need to update it with them. Not terribly painful if you move once every 5 years. Pretty annoying and error prone if you move every 6 months.
    - r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
      Hence option 2 - the PO box.
      - MiddleEndian 4y ago
        I do this, any bureaucratic organization that I want to be able to reach me (very very few) gets my PO box, which has remained the same across three addresses.
      - kortilla 4y ago
        Which is rejected as a valid address by many banks, government forms, etc. I want something that the post office guarantees has a real person behind it so I can use it for literally everything that requires an address.
  - al_borland 4y ago
    The US has mail forwarding for 1 year, but that doesn't solve the problem, as you still need to update the source information with all the companies. I usually end up spending several hours changing addresses when I move. It's better to do this right away than to rely on the forwarding completely. Some places get the change of address info automatically and update their records, but it's never the ones you actually want (usually catalogs and marketing mail). A PO box would be fine, but it's not an acceptable address with many businesses, so it's not a universal solution to the problem.
    - MiddleEndian 4y ago
      A workaround for some forms that don't accept PO Boxes: Type something like P0 B0X Type the address of the post office and then the PO Box number like an apartment number

schoen 4y ago

> Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody who happens to have your address. That does seem beneficial for the most part, but do you have ideas about how to handle the use cases like establishing new relationships (what, if anything, do you put on business cards?) or allowing the general public or a broad audience to contact you (what, if anything, do you put in advertisements, on your web site, on slides of a conference presentation, in an e-mail signature on mailing lists?).

al_borland 4y ago
The email service Hey (from the makers of Basecamp) has a feature where the first time someone emails you it goes into a screening bucket. You can then approve those senders who are allowed to email you. If you don't approve, you don't see the emails anymore. I initially signed up for the trail when the service launched. The first or second time I went to check the site/app it wasn't working. I was pretty much done with it at that point. I probably should have given it more of a chance and maybe they worked that out, but at $99/year for email my tolerance for issues is pretty low. They did (I suppose still do) have a lot of neat ideas around email though.
- Dyac 4y ago
  I effectively do this manually in Thunderbird. I have a saved search folder I treat as my "actual inbox" and I only add email addresses I want to receive mail from to the filter rule list.
hunter2_ 4y ago
I think it's simply a hybrid approach: you'd handle those unknown contacts with many:1 addresses (since there's no real alternative, as you imply), and you'd handle most known contacts with 1:1 addresses. A benefit is that you might let messages to some or all of those 1:1 addresses be sorted one way (e.g., they ping you) while messages to some or all of the many:1 addresses are sorted another way (e.g., you only check for them with a much longer interval). But then again, a diligently-maintained contact list can be leveraged to achieve same...

test6554 4y ago

Dang, you could trade stocks with information like that.