Comment by bitbang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitbang | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Same exact issue. Especially with people from Africa for some reason. I get a lot of stuff from 3 people from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Most everything there is managed by phone, and they just use my email as a throw-away address. The guy in South Africa has a collections agency after him. The guy in Kenya likes to order food delivery quite a bit. I occasionally change his order to extra spicy. The guy in Zimbabwe works for a college of some sort. I make sure he's signed up for all the educational trips to Europe.

Also some senior woman in Oregon, who is a frequenter of "silver singles".

Some industrial supply company in Canada is very confused by the fake Groupon I sent them for the free stuff they are trying to bill me for.

Some guy in Australia has his security deposit box setup with my address, and is way overdue on some payments.

(I've tried multiple times to correct the wrong email address of the people I mess with, and have been ignored)

Lots of US political junk mail, from many localities, both parties. LOTS AND LOTS OF KINKY PORN SITES.

Fortunately none of them have the dot in the address and I have a filter to send them all directly to trash.

I don't receive any junk mails anymore after switching to my custom domain.

It’s weird, but that’s been my experience too. I switched off Gmail (where I got tons of spam, although most properly caught by the spam filter) several years ago, and have received fewer than 200 spam emails in total since switching. I know this because my new host won’t allow the personalized spam filter to be enabled until you’ve received 200 spam.

I’m not at all careful to keep my email address hidden on the internet either.

It never occurred to me that it might be due to being on a custom domain. I figured either I was just lucky, or that there’s less spam these days.

I think you are lucky, I get around 5-10 spam mails on my custom domain daily. Granted, my address has been in a few data dumps.

Eventually you start getting a bunch of spam. I feel most of mine originated from GitHub and data-leaks.

Tip: configure a catch-all to your email address, and use custom email addresses for every website. I love having e.g. news.ycombinator.com@gilani.me and being able to filter out bad email addresses whenever they become tiresome.

I've also configured Mailgun on the domain (not what it was intended for but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) so whenever I need to send an outgoing email from one of my custom addresses, I use their SMTP credentials.

At this point, I've been me@ amin@ heyamin@ and even notamin@gilani.me.

Setting up catch-all email addresses is a recipe to get absolutely inundated with spam.

Possibly, but I pipe my email through Gmail so I haven't noticed.

I'm the only email address on my domain, and I haven't set up a catch-all. I use my actual email address to sign up for anything that requires a signup. I don't have a junk account, and I don't use +-aliases. I don't hide my address; it's listed on my website, in my HN profile, and likely in a bunch of random places on the web, unobfuscated. In general, I just don't worry about it.

My GMail spam folder has around 10-15 messages in it per day. My inbox is nearly always fine. The nice thing that GMail does is sort promotional emails that it doesn't judge to be outright spam under the "Promotions" category, which I don't see unless I seek it out. That one still isn't that bad, on the order for 10 per day, but it is genuinely stuff I don't care to see.

If I were to move away from GMail (which is on my todo list), I'd have to figure out what to do about those. Likely they mostly have unsubscribe links; after a quick scroll down the list, I think it's nearly all from companies that I do have or had an existing relationship with.

I wish GMail had an "unsubscribe" button so I don't have to hunt through emails for their often-hidden unsubscribe link. Yes, I could click Spam and then "Unsubscribe + Mark Spam", but I really want just "Unsubscribe", but that's not an option.

I do have a fairly uncommon last name, so it's not something that spammers might accidentally put in a word list to use as an email domain, but overall I've just mostly not cared about "protecting" my email address, and it's mostly not been a problem. Is this entirely atypical? If so, I wonder why...

> Likely they mostly have unsubscribe links; after a quick scroll down the list, I think it's nearly all from companies that I do have or had an existing relationship with.

At one point I decided to actually hit the unsubscribe links rather than just archiving these emails. Turns out I was subscribed to nearly 200 different mailing lists. But there were only 1 or 2 that wouldn't let me unsubscribe.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of undirected spam. No one seems to be harvesting git repos, for example.

I keep dedicated email addresses for most purposes, and the two that are getting any are a random mailing list, and the kickstarter address. That one has been caught in a vortex of spam, clearly meaning that kickstarter can't keep their mouths shut about customer emails.

I'm pretty sure the campaigns get your email address, I often get emails directly from them.

I've got a catch all email redirect for my address. I do get a decent volume of spam these days.

Most of it goes to:

* admin@<mydomain>.com - listed in whois publicly for a few years, understandable

* <dropbox's address>@<mydomain.com> - started coming in 2014, the fact they were breached only became properly known in 2016.

* <my first name>@<mydomain.com> - This is the actual email address I give to in person contacts. Not quite sure how it ended up on spam lists, my best guesses are from a recruiter sharing it, git commits (though the fact the address I use way more commonly for git isn't there indicates probably not) or someone just figured it out.

with all the data breaches spammers have millions of verified email addresses no need to scan the web for more.

I get a couple emails a day, which is about how much I was getting when I was on Gmail. However, I have been much less careful with my address too–I think spammers might just be less likely to mail custom domains because those addresses might be more likely to be invalid.

I, too, am 95% better after switching away from first.last@gmail.com to something@firstlast.com and using g-suite on that domain for the last decade or so.

I gave up on Gmail for all the same reasons as the stories in this thread.

Fortunately I have a rather unusual last name so I have first@last.dev. It comes with the bonus of having it work for my future children as well :p

> The guy in Kenya likes to order food delivery quite a bit. I occasionally change his order to extra spicy.

> The guy in Zimbabwe works for a college of some sort. I make sure he's signed up for all the educational trips to Europe.

Both made me laugh, you are a wild man!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com