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Comment by 0DHm2CxO7Lb3 | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the problems with email is that you have one global email tied to one inbox. Fastmail has the option to create multiple emails tied to one inbox so you could potentially have a unique email per sender, then if you start to receive spam it's easy to know who leaked it and disable the affected address

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Exactly. My own domain is on Fastmail. I have an alias for every sites I have account in (Amazon, eBay, Pocket, ...). If I got spammed using an address I know exactly where it came from, advise the sir and create another alias.

Isn’t alias for email a thing for decades ?

Since I started receiving spam on my email address (around 2002) I’ve always use an alias for every new website I subscribed.

I didn’t know it _wasn’t_ possible to not have alias ?

Edit : I found reference of aliases on the rfc2142 from 1997

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt

Ever since people started using freemail, aliases went away, because you typically register a single address per account.

But yeah, if you had your own domain, then aliases had been a normal part of e-mail/web hosting plans for example, for a very long time.

This feature is supported by GMail as well FWIW. If your email is john@gmail.com all john+X@gmail.com addresses are aliases for your primary inbox. So you can have john+ebay@gmail.com, john+that_scammy_site@gmail.com and so on to easily track down spam.

What prevents spammers from recognizing the + pattern and omit it?

Most of the time they don't care. They've got 4 million email addresses, they'll just spam all of them.

The problem with this is that it is immediately obvious to anyone who knows this how to go from john+that_scammy_site@example.comto john@example.com

I've been using this for years. IIRC it's called "chaining". Unfortunately I've come across many sites that don't recognize, or allow, the + character in their input field. For those sites i can still crates either a group email from my Gmail, or just add another alias.

It's not the same though. Fastmail allows a@fastmail.com and b@fastmail.com going to the same inbox. It's also easy to create these aliases.

You have revealed your real email using the gmail plus sign feature. It's not that difficult for the people selling the emails or the spammers to remove a plus sign and some characters after years of knowing this.

Does Fastmail use + like gmail?

No, you can have completely different email addresses (aliases), even on different domains

Fastmail also supports subdomain aliasing (where messages sent to <anything>©<username>.<domain> go to the <username>©<domain> inbox). This is less obvious to mass emailers that GMail + aliasing, and I don't think it can be detected alogrithmically in the way a + in the username on gmail.com can.

I normally sign up for services with an email that attests to the account's original intent, e.g. I buy cat food using chewy.com@<username>.<domain>.

Is that really a copyright symbol? I would think most webforms would reject that.

I suspect someone writing on a phone accidentally picked the wrong symbol, meaning to use @.

Maybe they could reserve one alphanumerical character for this purpose.

Too late to edit the original comment, but this is exactly what happened

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