The author is really saying “using the other party’s recognisable name as the localpart of your own email address is a mistake.” I agree with that. As a catch

The author is really saying “using the other party’s recognisable name as the localpart of your own email address is a mistake.” I agree with that. As a catch all user of twenty years, I too found this out pretty quickly. The solution is you pretend your catchall domain is some free email service, and then make up an account name that sounds plausible. jjsamson844 if it’s April 4th 2008. john1713@example.com if it’s January 3rd 2017. daphne.van.hampton@example.com if you want something more creative for your train journey free wifi sign up. Most of these sign ups get a row in your password database. Remembering them isn’t a problem. Why bother doing all of this? Because it’s not just spammers that spam you. It’s the companies themselves. Never again do you have to ask someone nicely to unsubscribe / never email you again and hope they’ll comply. You can trivially (procmail + a script) shadow ban them to another imap folder. (Personally, I move their email to Dead/Match and then my mail filter moves all subsequent emails from them to Dead/Follow, so I can do it all just by moving messages to the right place on my iPhone.) For the 10 times a year I have to actually email one of these people, yes, it’s a pain to configure my mail client to use the weird address. In the grand scheme of annoying many things, 5 clicks with copy and paste once every few weeks is no big deal.