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Comment by glitchc | Hacker News Reader

Can you do this without running your own email server? If buying email service from a vendor, costs are usually per user (per address).

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You can use aliases. You get 600 aliases with Fastmail for example.

But really you could just set up a 'catch all' and have everything routed to one inbox, then use filters to filter the emails to separate folders.

So emails to $PERMUTE1@domain.com could be filtered to a $PERMUTE1 folder, and so on.

Fastmail supports "subdomain addressing" out of the box. So if the email address is ... user@domain.com ... then you can use ... <anything>@user.domain.com ... without setting up any extra aliases, Fastmail will just handle it as if it's for user@domain.com.

And you can also reply from such addresses without extra configuration. On the desktop I use MailMate as my email client, which works great with dynamic aliases. The win is that you don't have to configure anything extra when signing up for some online service.

https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html

You can do this in Google Suite btw, as you can configure a forwarding rule. The problem with Google Suite, last time I tried, is that they no longer want to sign emails with DKIM for such dynamic aliases, so you can receive emails just fine, but sending emails from such addresses is a problem if you have SPF/DKIM domain rules.

That's good to know. I've only just switched 48 hours ago, so this is something I'll look at.

I had them handle my DNS for that domain so I'm assuming this won't require any extra setup.

This is what I do, for both Fastmail and replicated for my own email domain.

One Fastmail alias can be "(asterisk)@domain.tld", by the way, so you can send and receive emails to every address possible. When you send an email from the (asterisk) alias, you can type whatever you want in the from address box. I use their DNS as my primary DNS for all my domains so I can email to/from all of them easily like this.

(asterisk) means the character itself, I can't figure out how to type one on this site though.

Edit: this wasn't a feature 3 years ago, I only discovered this 4 months ago when I added a few domains to my account and they added the (asterisk) aliases for those automatically.

Yes. easyDNS offers this service. They call it a "catch all mailmap." You also need your "real" mail server ISP to be okay with getting unlimited addresses forwarded to them. Some ISPs don't like it because it makes SPF more difficult.

https://kb.easydns.com/knowledge/mailmaps/

If you have gmail (not sure what other providers support this), you can use + or . in your email address and add anything you want.

For example: myemail+twitter@example.com or myemail.youtube@example.com both go to myemail@example.com

The nonstandard dot behavior turned out to be a really bad idea. I've had numerous instances of people signing up for other services (e.g. Amazon) with my gmail address, adding various dot combinations. Whenever I have contacted Amazon (or others) to report a security issue--that I have access to someone else's account because "their" email address is routed to me, I just end up having a really unproductive conversation.

I think you’re mistaken about how the dot works with gmail.

Last I remember, dots aren’t a separator like plus is, they just don’t count as part of the name.

So Gmail treats my.email@ and m.y.e.m.a.i.l@ as aliases of myemail@

Some email marketers are catching on to this approach though and automatically strip anything between “+” and the domain.

You could do subdomain aliasing instead (with Fastmail, or with Google Suite if you try hard enough) and there's no way to detect and strip that, since it looks and feels like a normal address.

It can be detected, just takes a bit more work (look up the domain's nameservers, see if they point to fastmail, if so rewrite the email address)

myemail.youtube@gmail.com would go to myemailyoutube@gmail.com (or my.email.you.tube@gmail.com). Gmail's email normalization is like: sed -e s/[+].*//g -e s/[.]//g

Assuming the vendor doesn't claim that having + is invalid. I've seen that quite a lot.

Not exactly so, dot in address is just ignored by gmail, so “myemail.youtube“ is equivalent to “myemailyoutube“, not to “myemail“. Plus sign works as you described.

I do that with ProtonMail, however anybody with bad intentions can remove the suffix. But it helps tracing leaks and lazy spammers.

Tons of places don't accept that as a valid email though.

Does it work with a dot too? Is this a Google Suite thing?

It works with a dot too, so:

exampl.e@protonmail.com == example@protonmail.com == e.xample@protonmail.com

This is a good guide on how you can leverage this technique to identify which website you signed up for, and who sold your email to third parties.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/7425v7/protonma...

I do it with the free email address that comes with my domain name. In this case I'm using gandi.net but I'm sure most domain name providers have a similar deal.

I do this with FastMail aliases, works great!

Ahh aliases. Still show up in the main account though. I guess they can be filtered as spam.

Fastmail also has a catch all / wildcard option which I am using. You don't need to create aliases for every email; instead any email to *@mydomain.com goes to my single email inbox. And similarly I can send from anything@mydomain.com.

I use a subdomain for it. Anything to that subdomain is marked as read and filed in the "spam-adjacent" folder. I'll look in there for transactional stuff and marketing bs never increments my unread counter. Only real people appear in my actual inbox and it's basically email nirvana.

The way I do it is I use a subdomain for any aliased email, e.g. vendor.com@account.mydomain.com and then I just have rules to move anything sent to account.mydomain.com to a separate folder, then it never shows up in the main mailbox unless I put it there myself. Works fine!

I do this on G Suite with a single license.

I do this with migadu.com, as it gives you unlimited domains and addresses. Happy customer.

I use fast mail with a custom domain.

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