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Comment by Cacti | Hacker News Reader

I registered my own domain and switched my email over to a service that lets me generate arbitrary email aliases. When I go to a site or have to otherwise give an email address, I create a new unique alias just for that service. This lets me track where they are leaking my email to, and lets me blackhole the whole site if needed.

It’s great.

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I've been doing a similar thing for year with the gmail feature that lets you add "+anything" to the end of your email address. If someone starts spamming myrealemail+thethingIusedforthatsite@gmail.com, it's easy to create a filter to trash it automatically.

I've tried the catchall method on a domain I control, but got way too much spam people trying random addresses.

I have first@last.io. My mail provider (fast mail) supports sending mail to service@first.last.io. This then ends up in a folder called service, or in my inbox.

Works pretty great.

I'd imagine your average spam list purchaser removes the + stuff on Gmail addresses.

So blacklist everything coming in without a +

Sure, if you never gave any friends/family the non-+ version.

And all websites accepted emails with "+" in them (hint: your email validation regex sucks and is not standard compliant).

If a site has broken email validation and I absolutely positively NEED to use it, then I'll grudgingly create an explicit alias just for that site. Otherwise, I find a competitor that doesn't screw this up. In both cases, I end up passively-aggressively tweeting about the company's email validation, though.

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