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Comment by megous | Hacker News Reader

That's no good. You're still sending your primary address, before the +. They can remove or modify anything after +, and you'll still receive the email.

I'm slowly transitioning for having a random 20 char generated alias email for every service/use and there's no chance anyone will hit a real mailbox by chance. If alias leaks, I can either abandon the service and block it, or change the registered email for the service to a new alias and block the old one.

In addition to that, I have a few easy to remember/type emails to give out to people, that I never use on the internet.

The result being no spam even without a spam blocker. (to the new addresses)

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That sounds great, but the problem I see with the n-address approach is when you do actually want to search for a received email but you don't want to remember what inbox it went to. I can see workarounds - like feed them all to a gmail box and filter them into their own folders. Or load them all into a native email client as separate accounts.

I felt that way about using a password manager and generating random passwords (what if I want to log into something and don't want to remember which password I used) but eventually realized that password managers are literally designed to make this as painless as possible and I should relax more. Now I use KeepassXC, random passwords and life is good.

Are email managers a thing, like password managers? How do you solve this problem?

You can configure your MDA to deliver mail for all these different addresses to the same inbox. What I did for a while was have 2 inboxes: personal mail and commercial. All the tagged emails went to the Commercial inbox. Either way my mail client (Mail.app) can easily search accross Inboxes and/or present unified views if I actually want everything together.

I store aliases (+ info about the service I provided them to) in the database and use simple PHP script to manipulate the db from the web.

On the mail server side, I have postfix set up to read the database and deliver everything for a valid address to a single mailbox.

It should be workable with any service that will allow you to setup aliases for a single mailbox. If they allow to set it using API, that would allow for automation.

On the sending side, given that I haven't yet found a need to communicate too frequently with any of the services I use via email, I have a simple PHP form to send email with the specified alias address set as From on the envelope and inside the email.

Ditto, except that I just use postfix's 'virtual' mechanism. Simple additional hack to simplify address creation; all my legal addresses begin with a particular 4-char sequence, and by default, all email addressed to a uid beginning with these 4 chars gets through unless explicitly blocked. This means I can make up addrs on the fly, without having to add them to the back-end on a per-address basis.

Hi Mos- That's basically what getcovert is meant to be. I forward all of your email along to your singular email address (so no multi-mailbox), but the site never sees your real email.

+ is also notoriously unsupported by many sites—either because of horribly naive email address validators, or by their unsubscribe web pages. I can't tell you how many times an unsubscribe page has shown "myuser stuffaftertheplus@example.com"—where the + didn't get escaped and got interpreted by the web server as a space. It's happened to me so many times I have %2b memorized! :-)

My solution was to change my email server setup so that . and _ act the same as +. Someone might guess that they can strip something after a + but nobody is going to strip an address after an _.

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