Comment by ergot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergot | Hacker News Reader

I usually break E-mail addresses into the following categories:

Monolithic. That one email address you put on business cards, hand out at conferences, post in public forums. Basically a catch-all that quickly becomes a firehose for spam and bacn[1] but every now and then you get an actual reachout as described in this post. They are infact gems when you get them, and always remind me how precious E-mail, as a loose social network, is.

Registrations. For creating throwaway accounts on various online social outlets. Got an IMGUR.com meme you must send to a friend over IM? No problem, your trusty registrations e-mail account, or account(s) have you covered.

Commerce. Super secure email address which is on a trusted provider, and is rarely, if ever, given out publicly. You change your password frequently on this, and make sure not to contaminate it with other identities. Typically tied to several accounts where money moves in them. Accounts with credit cards, PayPal, etc.

Others? I am interested to hear other people's single-duty uses for email? I know I could write about other categories, but those three cover a large portion of what I use E-mail for.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn

I use a catch-all domain, and every site/business gets its own <businessname>@example.com. For business cards and friends I use something like myname@ or contact@

When one businesses address starts getting spam I blackhole it.

Similar to the + suffix trick but works on any site.

What software do you use to manage that?

You can do that with Fastmail easily.

+1, I use fastmail, if you use the domain only for e-mail, you can use fastmail's nameservers, DNS setup takes 2 minutes.

I do this using Google Apps, but I'm grandfathered into the free plan on my domain. I'm fairly sure most mail servers can do this though.

I have exim set up to allow `+` or `-` as a localpart separator - I tend to use `name-business@example.com` when registering for domains. Works everywhere and is easily filterable with user-specific SIEVE or system_filter.

Same here - my 'example.com' was a brand new but very generic domain. I've only used it for email, and never for public email addresses, so it doesn't appear in Google or get any spam. I would recommend this to anyone!

Same here. I have a few prefixes that I allow, so that randomly guessing an address doesn't just arrive at my inbox.

As you point out, the ability to blackhole any of these one-off addresses makes the approach a great way to deal with spam and quasi-spam. It's a shame that so few people are set up with the necessary software or infrastructure, so it remains a bit of a fringe approach.

I particularly enjoy the reaction of some retail employees when they think, for a moment, that my e-mail address includes the name of their store. "Your email address is 'abcpeetscoffee'?" "Well, yeah, for this particular transaction it is."

> I use a catch-all domain

Just make sure you renew the domain and maintain ownership. Even if the domain provider says they'll ensure ownership after expiration, I don't trust that they will. Assume the domain is ripe for new ownership by somebody else once it expires.

There are services like Mark Monitor which address this issue, but they are prohibitively expensive and only useful for large enterprise.

This categorized approach is what my email usage has evolved into over the years. I ended up "demoting" email addresses over time and letting them be used for spam-attractive uses or disuse altogether.

I have another category for family/close personal friends. For money matters, I go a step further and split out general commerce (online shopping) from financial institutions (banking/investment).

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