Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

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I picked up a trick from my friend that's been working pretty well.

I have danieljackoway.com mail setup with Google Apps, and I have it setup so that *@danieljackoway.com forwards to <my actual email>@danieljackoway.com. I generally respond from <my actual email>@danieljackoway.com, but I don't give it out online at all. (It is on my business cards, though.) My normal pattern for signing up for stuff is to signup with foo.tld@danieljackoway.com. And then if they won't stop spamming me or they leak my email to something spammy, I know who they are and I can setup a filter so I don't see any of it.

I also use it to tell where people are emailing me from, to an extent. So in my hn profile is hn@danieljackoway.com (which, if I ever get popular enough that I need to start filtering hi@danieljackoway.com to skip the inbox, I can give precedence to).

I also have a label that gets applied to things that are actually sent to <my actual email>@danieljackoway.com

I do something similar with wildcard forwarding, only instead of filtering those emails, I full out block an alias when I start getting spam there.

Though I must say that I've been surprised at how many (theoretically) legit places have leaked my email address. Like when aweber got hacked, I suddenly started getting spam on a whole bunch of aliases.

If my address gets leaked but I still want to continue getting email from a company, I update my email address with them to include the (then) current month and year (so companyMMYY@) and then I disable the old alias. So far, I haven't gotten any spam at any of these new MMYY aliases so it kinda feeds my suspicion that their mailing list must have been hacked.

An analogous trick if you don't have a domain name is to register with +identifier at the end of your email name, i.e. myname+foo.tid@gmail.com. Depending on your client, you can then see who's spamming you.

To be fair though, the spam recognition on gmail is so good that I don't even have to worry about hiding my email. I rarely see more than 1 spam email a month.

Be aware, most spammers also know this trick, and it's fairly trivial to strip -identifier s out the addresses.

Spamfiltering, on the other hand, just works.

I've found that trick to be inconsistent, as some sites I register with do not accept the + character.

http://twitter.com/#!/timberners_lee/status/16395246236

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