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Been doing this for years, and surprised he didn't seem to mention the other benefit: "infinity" email addresses. Oh, rando burger spot wants an email for some
by jrm4 1y ago
Been doing this for years, and surprised he didn't seem to mention the other benefit: "infinity" email addresses. Oh, rando burger spot wants an email for some free fries? Great, hit me up at randoburgerspot@"mydomain".com .
- deadbabe 1y agoThis is the most useful thing about having your own domain for email.
- imiric 1y agoI like that as well, but it's exhausting having to explain every time that, no, I don't in fact work at randoburgerspot...
- jrm4 1y agoWhat? It's your opportunity to nerd out and lecture people on why they're doing email WRONG!!! (only half joking)
- EvanAnderson 1y agoI usually just say "I receive all email @mydomain.com. I make one-off emails so I can tell who sells my email address." Most "normies" get it.
- jcynix 1y agoEasy, just remove the vowels from the local part of the address: rndbrgr@example.com Even easier: I have a list of pre-generated fantasy addresses on my smartphone and can pass one to randoburgerspot on the fly.
- robocat 1y ago> fantasy addresses Highly unrecommended if it's important or you're a repeat customer. It is easiest to pick a consistent generation scheme that helps you to remember the email address you gave. Obviously record it somewhere too (a folder for the first you've-just-signed-up email is easy) For throwaway accounts it doesn't matter what you give.
- danielparks 1y agoI’ve been surprised how infrequently I need to explain this — definitely fewer than 10 times in the last 20 years of doing some variation if this consistently. I keep expecting to have to explain, but the vast majority of the time people don’t ask.
- xp84 1y agoI got a LOT more confused looks, especially because I stupidly used a subdomain for this purpose. Imagine like, burgers@e.abc.co.uk when someone is expecting an @gmail.com. If I could think of an unambiguous .com, .net, or .org that is a pronounceable word that wasn't registered already by 2001, I'd be maybe willing to try this again.
- Neywiny 1y agoSame here. I have a .dev tld (Ooh ahh very fancy). My email is [first]@[last].dev . The amount of times they go "@ gmail?" Is astonishing. These are people who all day, countless times per day, for countless years, are collecting emails (front desk clerks, support reps, whatever), and not one email in the history of emails is the format blah@blah.blah@gmail.com, but somehow they think mine is. Should've just stuck with the Gmail
- SchemaLoad 1y agoI've had firstname@lastname.me for a few years now and so far haven't had any confusion. They just read it back to me to make sure it's correct. I used to do the businesname@mydomain and that caused lots of confusion, especially when support ask me for my email and I can't remember what it was. And they are confused because my email has their name in it.
- ziml77 1y agoMine is me@[fullname].[tld] and I still kind of regret it because no one expects such a short set of characters before the @ sign. Even many websites don't. It's never been rejected but rather it breaks basic personal details masking. Because they often mask an email address replacing all but the first and last characters of the username portion with asterisks and leaving the domain fully exposed... Not to mention that I've been told by a couple people that they find it to be an awkward email address. Sending to "me" from their perspective should mean sending to themselves.
- Neywiny 1y agoHmmm I've had websites not accept mine but I'm still not sure why. Maybe it's the .dev . Cheapo regex
- layer8 1y agoI only had once in over 20 years someone asking me to clarify that. Maybe because I add a short standard prefix before “randoburgerspot” (which also happens to serve as a wildcard filter).
- remuskaos 1y agoI've been using my own domain for mail like that for over fifteen years now, and it happened only once that I've had to explain "no I don't work at $drugstore" when giving my "drugstore@mydomain.tld". And even that one time only got me like a weird look, but no further discussion. I enter my mail address into some form myself most of the time, after all.
- hungryhobbit 1y agoSpamgourmet lets you do this for free without your own domain, and has other great features also.
- daveidol 1y agoLots of these services get their domains blocklisted eventually, sadly.
- greggsy 1y agoCompanies tried to block Apple’s Hide My Email in the months after its release, but I haven’t been blocked in years now. I’m assuming they quickly realised that it was here the stay.
- strogonoff 1y agoFun fact: Apple blocks using Hide My Email with itself, which I found out once I tried to use it in my contact details when ordering a phone. Their online system reported unknown error when placing the order until I specified a Gmail address instead.
- rpdillon 1y agoI found two providers in 20 years that blocked my xoxy.net spam gourmet address. It's not that big of a problem.
- rpdillon 1y agoBeen using spam gourmet for 20 years. Basically a flawless service.
- aussieguy1234 1y agoCould also be useful if someone puts a typo in your email username when sending you an important email. You'll still get the email with a catch-all emails set up on your own domain. But you won't without this.
- Johnny555 1y agoBut also annoying when your domain is very similar to another business and you keep getting their emails because of typos. My email address at my hosted domain is like jsmith@jsmith.com, and I have a catchall so I can get mail for *@jsmith.com Someone eventually bought jsmith.net for his business and now I get a lot of mail meant for jacob@jsmith.net sent to my jsmith.com domain. Fortunately he uses just the one address and now I set up an autoforwarding rule to forward his jacob@ emails to him.
- vidyava 1y agoEven having a Gmail address doesn't make you immune from someone putting in the wrong address. I made a throwaway/spam account with a silly name back in ~2007, and then in ~2015 someone established a fairly successful company with that name. I now regularly get job applications, tax documents, and employee timesheets to my email. They even signed up for the service that controls their website with my email. I keep waiting for them to contact me about taking over the address, but as far as I can tell they don't even realize they don't control it.
- robotresearcher 1y agoGmail has a limited version of this. It leaks your real address, but it makes filtering easy. <yourname>+<arbitrary_str>@gmail.com steve+randoburger@gmail.com
- bb88 1y agoI've seen places that won't allow a "+" saying it's an invalid character.
- 1oooqooq 1y agoah! the fathers of slop vibe code: copy paste coders. the "validate email input regex" that mistakenly rejects plus sign have been copy pasted for so long it might live on forever.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoCould be by design. They want you using your main gmail address and not signing up multiple times.
- 1oooqooq 1y agoyou'd think if that was the only thing broken on that copy-pasted-regex.
- rlpb 1y agoMicrosoft, for example, for a Windows login account does this.
- Evidlo 1y agoI use PurelyMail to get email redirection with wildcard support. Costs $4/year when I use it with Gmail for the actual storage. I use an underscore so my addresses look like evidlo_[placholder]@example.com
- 1y ago
- ronbenton 1y agoPerhaps you missed it or the author updated the article, but I think this does cover it: >Oh, and I highly recommend providers that offer a "catch-all" feature. This way, you can have one main email address and unlimited <put something here>@yourdomain.com email addresses. It's useful to have it separated, like netflix@yourdomain.com, but still receive the emails inside the same inbox.
- paranoidrobot 1y agoI do this, too - but I've been running into more and more companies that block you from using their company name in the email address. It also results in awkward conversations if you have to talk to staff. I had ordered some pet supplies online a while ago registered like this. Then I go in store more recently and they ask "Do you have an account with us?", I give them that email when asked, which causes them to pause. We went around a few times of them asking what my email was, before getting a manager who thought I was doing something dodgy and decided to try looking up my account by phone number instead of email.
- daveidol 1y agoThat’s pretty funny. If you use a password manager you could obviously just put something random instead of the company name.
- jenadine 1y agoOr just rot13 or some scheme like that.
- majkinetor 1y agoKISS, just add dot somewhere.
- cfn 1y agoNo try giving that email at the store.
- daveidol 1y agoI meant the password manager would just be to help you keep track of the names. The names themselves don't have to be long (e.g. `s11@mydomain.com`).
- dzhiurgis 1y agoOhhh good point. So many sites basically only accept gmail + some other popular provider.
- Terr_ 1y agoI've occasionally pondered some sort of phone app that that can dynamically create a random new forwarding email, and keep track of what purpose it was for and who you shared it with.
- WorldMaker 1y agoFirefox/Mozilla and Apple both offer services along these lines.
- Terr_ 1y agoI was thinking of something that would work with a personal domain, with a mail server that I (indirectly) control. It would maintain a small pool of immediately-available addresses, since there might be latency in setting up a new one. When I need it, one is removed from the pool, recorded with metadata (e.g. purpose, duration, who to blame if it gets spammed), and in the background the process is started to restock the pool.
- backscratches 1y agoI recommend simplelogin.io
- estimator7292 1y agoI don't even have to bother with creating a 'real' alias address. When I make an account I can punch in any random address @mydomain and it shows up in my primary inbox in a special folder. It's so much more convenient
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sunnybeetroot 1y agoWhat’s your solution when you don’t renew your domain and someone else buys it? Would that person have a single entry to every single account you own?