Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

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I did that, too. Used a catch-all and just subbed to things with a new e-mail address, relying on the catch-all to put it all into one box.

Big mistake.

First off, I got FLOODED with e-mail bounce-back spam because spammers send e-mail with forged From: headers and I'd get all the errors.

Second, I discovered that nobody is actually selling my e-mail address except for one gaming forum I used years ago. Not even Facebook has sold my e-mail address.

Third, I've run into issues when replying to e-mails. I filed a support ticket with a company once, where the e-mail address I had registered with them was company@mydommain.com. They responded via e-mail, and when I replied to said e-mail, their ticket system rejected it since the From: address was my main address of myname@mydomain.com.

Now that I want to just switch to a single e-mail account with gmail, I find myself needing to try to find every e-mail address I've used @mydomain.com and changing them with the website. Meh...not worth it.

> Not even Facebook has sold my e-mail address.

Won't FB be among those least likely to sell your email address? FB has tons of ways to make money using your data. Your email address offers very low marginal utility over all the rest of your data.

FYI you've used marginal utility incorrectly in this context. I think it would be better to say a low return.

"thus the marginal utility of a good or service is the change in the utility from an increase in the consumption of that good or service." [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

Facebook would rather BUY users' e-mail addresses in bulk.

You could have solved the second problem by storing the email with the login and password in a password manager. Maybe they were not a thing yet when you started this experiment.

The third problem is more serious. I use Thunderbird. I googled and there are a couple of addons that makes it easy to edit the from address without having to create new Thunderbird identities.

https://github.com/absorb-it/Virtual-Identity

https://freeshell.de//~kaosmos/index-en.html#editsender

Both are somewhat unsafe, one because of the site certificate, the other because of the download site.

The first problem looks like a showstopper tough.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/correct-i...

This is the one I use.

Why you need addons for it? Thunderbird allows to change From address by default. ("customize address" in identity combobox)

I never noticed that, thanks. I googled and found it's there since Thunderbird 45, April 12, 2016.

Yeah, I started this back in 2003. I imagine password managers existed back then, but they certainly weren't as common.

These days I don't even use Thunderbird. I just have gmail retrieve all my e-mail from my POP3 server. Though FWIW, I still have Thunderbird installed with all my e-mail going back to 2003. I imagine there's a way I could capture every e-mail address I've used then manually go to each web site and change my registered e-mail address.

Hi Sohcahtoa82, selling might not happen that often (fortunately), but data leaks happen very often (see http://breachlevelindex.com/ for example)

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