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The best one was when someone said they were going to give me excellent service because “you work for corporate”, confusing the company name before vs. after th
by greengreengrass 4mo ago
The best one was when someone said they were going to give me excellent service because “you work for corporate”, confusing the company name before vs. after the @ sign. I forget which company it was now but the agent was convinced I must be someone important.
I was torn between explaining and letting them believe it :-)
Most of the time, folks just don’t understand why their company name is in the address and they think it’s a mistake.
To be honest, I do tend to avoid this for anything other than throwaways because it causes too much confusion when I have to phone up, and I’m not really doing it out of a misguided belief it helps with spam (at least, it doesn’t help any more than security by obscurity is unsuitable as a singular defence, but maybe has a tiny role when layered into a broader strategy…)
- FLHerne 4mo agoI find it's convenient for knowing which companies have immediately - and illegally, in this country - sold my details on to third-party spammers. Makes it easy not to do business with them.
- genewitch 4mo agomaybe i can write a whatthreewords style "email identity mapper" so you put in "walmart.com" and it spits out "busybee223@example.com" and "autozone rewards" yields "Horserider184@example.com" then if you start getting spammed, you use the w3w style thing to reverse it and see what site/entity sold your email... then all of the "this doesn't/won't work because they'll just spam the entire domain" arguments go away, the "no, your email address" style comments go away...
- greengreengrass 4mo agoGood thought experiment! Makes it hard to remember the correct address for each site, but meh, that's the job of my password manager anyway.
- genewitch 4mo agoone wouldn't have to remember. if the address you gave out using the w3w-style encoder starts getting spammed, you can reverse it with the w3w-style decoder. you'd need an app or a mnemonic device of some sort if you wanted to give an email out in public as opposed to sitting at a computer. but ideally on the computer when you notice spam you just reverse the email address back to who you gave it to; "target.com", "kroger.com"
- sebastiennight 4mo agoSimpleLogin / ProtonMail and other providers do this for you automatically and call it an "alias". You can choose to have the company name visible in the first part of the email address or not. (with the last part being your own domain of course)