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Comment by inapis | Hacker News Reader

Oh companies have become smarter about it! Even the scammers I suspect! Many won’t accept + in the email address and I think now it’s well known enough that most scammers will run a regex to detect and remove the + sign.

Useful workaround is to have unique aliases on a domain name you control. Can’t get around that with a minute of work!

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If you control your email, you can do slightly better with the ‘+’. Share addresses of the form ‘me+my-tag@’, strip on ‘-’ to deliver these to ‘me+my@’, and have ‘me@’ immediately block the sender.

If you control your own email, why not just have company@ ?

fastmail supports a variation of this: if my email is me@mydomain.com, then I can use service+me@mydomain.com, or better service@me.mydomain.com (or anything@me.mydomain.com). It seems like it'd be a little less obvious to scammers.

With fastmail you can just make a alias. My address is me@mydomain.com and in the settings you can make a alias where you can just use something like garbage@mydomain.com

https://i.imgur.com/UWoU4NA.png

Fastmail also lets you use wildcards and catchall addresses, giving you infinite email addresses whenever you need them, with no way to tell what “base address” they resolve to internally.

For example, my Twitter address might be twitter@mydomain.com, my Google address google@mydomain.com and so on. All of those go straight to my inbox unless I decide to set up individual filters for them.

The downside is that I can’t easily migrate to a service that doesn’t support this.

Shout-out to my new mail provider Migadu [0] whose model is “pay for the number of emails you send, not the number of mailboxes you have”. This opens up all sorts of interesting opportunities.

Not affiliated, just a happy customer.

[0]: https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html

I have been using this system for about a year, and it works great. I generally use the pattern yourdomain.com@accounts.mydomain.net. However, I have found from time to time that I never get account signup/confirmation emails to these addresses. It seems like they're being silently rejected. Does anyone know if there's some kind of email validation service that might be filtering these?

I guess I could use a hash of the domain (eg asdffdsa@accounts.mydomain.net) to make my strategy less visible, but that feels like I'm probably overthinking it.

I use <random>@mydomain.com. My password manager remembers which I used.

Yes, it’s a great feature! They also have many non-fastmail.com domains available on the basic plan.

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