Comment by dvcrn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvcrn | Hacker News Reader

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unique-per-service email addresses sound indeed interesting. How did you set it up?

I am a google apps customer and already have a few 20 aliases in there but having to go through their UI every time I sign up seems very tiresome. Can I create a wildcard email in the terms of service-*@bar.com being a alias of email foo@bar.com?

Do you know of a non-selfhosted provider that is able to do that?

/EDIT: Looks like fastmail, a service many on HN recommended is able to do something similar [0], though if one email gets added into a spam list, it seems to be not possible to remove one particular one.

/EDIT2: Fastmail just confirmed to be on Twitter that it is possible to set individual emails to rejected. Though this requires effectively creating a new alias and setting it to bounce which falls under the account limitations [1], so 600 for a single person account.

[0]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html

[1]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html

My email is handled by Google Apps for Business, and I just use e.g. dropbox@hemsley.cc or facebook@hemsley.cc - and have everything come to my real mailbox. Nothing to set up when I want to sign up for a new site. LastPass stores the different email addresses.

This works better than something+realaddress@gmail.com because many sites fail to handle/allow that 'format'.

I do this too. You get more spam with a catchall address, but Google get most of it. And there is no setup time lost with a new service - just use newservicename@yourdomain.com when signing up and you're away.

For gmail, if you have someone@gmail.com, you can just append +anything to your address like this: someone+anything@gmail.com. It will still end up in your mailbox without having to set up anything. See https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo...

I would assume that google apps version of gmail offers something similar.

Just tested this with my google apps account and it works there, too.

Also, iCloud allow this.

This feature is called sub-addressing, but it is also known as plus addressing or tagged addressing.

I also use it but some services do not allow the plus sign in their registration form. Very frustrating.

Rejecting addresses with a plus is to me a strong incompetence clue, so unless somehow unavoidable between two choices I chose the one allowing a '+'.

Sometime I even fire a mail explaining people rejecting '+' how and why they lost my business...

I feel the same way. (=

I used to use https://spamgourmet.com and was quite happy. You can create email addresses on the fly without doing anything in their UI: alias.number.account@spam gourmet.com. Alias is the per-site value, number is the count of emails you want to allow through before automatically routing the rest to /dev/null. I seem to recall an option to remove the numerical limit, too - once you trust the place you gave your address to.

Same here. It's free, it's incredibly easy to create new addresses, and so far (on the order of a decade) it's been trouble free for me. If you start getting spam any an address you just log in to spamgourmet, switch off the address and you're done. No send-this-plus-address filters to set up at your mail host, no subdomain tricks to fuss over, no need to create spam aliases on your Fastmail account. The only feature that I wish it had is the ability to view a log of where the spam was coming from for each address.

With Google Mail (and Apps) anything after a + in the first part of the address is ignored, so foo+dropbox@gmail.com would be routed to foo@gmail.com. That's the easiest way to do it that I know of. No need for managing separate aliases.

A lot of website purposely remove the part after the plus to avoid multiple sign ups with the same email, but different label.

Plus you can't completely shut down a label. You could route it into the trash but it will still end up in your email account.

Whilst great info, unfortunately most of the sites that one would actually try to use this on don't accept addresses containing a "+" as valid.

Another Google Mail trick is to use periods. Not as useful as the +, but for those sites that don't accept +, one can usually add in a few extra periods to place sites into buckets (multiple adjacent periods don't work).

m.y.e.m.a.i.l@example.com

Even if they did accept it, haven't spammers figured out the pattern by now?

I don't think spammers look at individual email addresses. They're interested in 50 million emails, not you. I suspect the number of people using subaddressing is too small to notice. If it became popular enough that even computer illiterate people began using it, that's when it would be noticed.

Unfortunately vendor sites such as apple.com don't realize xy@g and x.y@g are equivalent and will let people register both. If you accidentally click approve on the confirmation email then good luck getting Apple to remove the second account. Which is how my wife gets tons of email from Apple about a stranger's iTunes purchases along with other random items.

If you control the email address that the stranger registered to their Apple account, you could initiate a password reset, change the password, then login and change the email address to something that's not yours.

You probably just locked the stranger out of accessing their account though, so you probably shouldn't do this, unless said stranger is signing up for all kinds of services using your email address, in which case maybe they deserve it. :p

In Gmail and Apps you can add a +suffix, e.g. dvcrn+hn1@gmail.com will send you mail, assuming your main address is dvcrn@gmail.com.

Gmail also ignores full stops, so you could also use d.v.crn@gmail or dvc.rn@gmail etc.

All google email addresses will accept

yourusername+anything@gmail.com

This also works on google apps hosted email domains. You can then use that as part of a filter if you start getting spam to it.

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