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Comment by notmyname | Hacker News Reader

I use my own domain running my own mail server (postfix, etc). I figured there is no better way to learn about running a mail server than actually doing it. My favorite thing is having a catch all email address that lets me give a unique email to everyone (business, website, etc) who asks. For example, I know that anything that goes to hackernews@ will come from here. Anything to bestbuy@ comes from there. And I've had one case where I started getting tons of spam to one specific address. Blacklist that address, and the spam problem stopped.

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You can use email+bestbuy@gmail.com and email+hackernews@gmail.com for the same purpose.

In case of spam you can add a filter and delete all emails to a given address.

If I were a spammer the first thing I'd do to my database is removing the "+something" part in each gmail address.

So far they don't, though--presumably because it's rare enough that they don't care.

Yeah, but you're assuming that spammers knows what the heck they're doing.

You think spammers don't know what they're doing? They have all sorts of methods for harvesting addresses, ranging from scraping to data theft. They have figured out how to send a virtual shit ton of messages a day at almost no cost to themselves by developing and running botnets. They are on the cutting edge, and arguably, a major driver behind computer vision which they use for breaking captchas. They are a thorn in the side of every ISP, email provider and sys admin in the world. Years and too many man hours to count have been spent trying to stop spam, with a combination of technology and law. Still, the spammers manage to keep their enterprises humming along.

I think they have figured out how to sanitize email addresses.

SPAM has become a HUGE business. I'd guess they do have a pretty good idea about what they're doing.

OP: I did the same thing... running a server for anything is the best way to get started in Linux..

I did a little write up on my "crazy ass email setup" here: http://julian.tosh.us/2010/01/my-crazyass-email-setup/

It's evolved a bit since then and addresses gst's point... I've recently added regular expressions to my postfix maps so an email must match a certain pattern to get through... so it's more like a moderated catchall domain.

For the newsletter I run I see almost 10% of subscribers doing just that and another 6% using custom emails.

Or add a period in the middle of your email, e.g. em.ail@gmail.com. I usually do that when signing up for accounts online, then have all mail coming to a tweaked address autosorted into a folder...

Some sites don't allow the '+' operator in email addresses. I used to do this but now run a catchall on my personal domain name.

Yes, but there are many sites (even reputable ones that should know better) that don't allow email addresses with a + in it. It's infuriating... but it's real...

Some signups still don't allow '+' signs.

His method is better, albeit harder to set up.

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