Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ibethewalrus | Hacker News Reader

Someone posted on HN fastmail includes a very unusual and nice way to stop spam using alias, basically it's mailinator baked in: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/aliases.html

View on HN

I pay for FastMail for this very reason. When I transferred off my Google Apps email account, I set up a unique ___@ for every website. If my email ever leaks, I'll know who leaked it (or sold it).

Same here. I simply set up a catchall alias so <anything>@somedomain forwards to foo@regulardomain; very convenient. The fact that FastMail supports multiple custom domains, at least with standard accounts, is also nice -- even more so since you can (optionally) use their own nameservers and set up whatever DNS records you want (I use that for some personal websites), while they make sure SPF/DKIM records are always correct.

(Having a separate domain is not really necessary, but I registered it through nearlyfreespeech.net and use their WHOIS privacy service; at least J. Random can't easily figure out my identity based on the email address alone).

Outlook.com offers aliases too: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Add-or-remove-an-em...

I don't think Outlook.com supports catchall/wildcard aliases though, which makes using unique addresses for everything a bit annoying, which makes address reuse more likely.

Interesting point! I hadn’t thought about wildcards in aliases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com