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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I hate managing accounts and passwords so much that I'll walk away when a "create an account" is thrown in my face.

Login via Google / Facebook / Whatever is sometimes helpful, but it usually results in SPAM. For example, I logged into Redfin through Google and they immediately started spamming me.

Other times, when I login through Facebook and disable sharing my email, the site that I'm trying to log into has a "mystery error" because the concept of not sharing my email address never occurred to whoever wrote the integration.

Most of the time, I just use a unique email address with each site. My domain has a catch-all email address, so when someone starts spamming it, I know who did it.

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How do you avoid getting spam to random addresses using catchall?

I use a subdomain; making your main domain a catch-all will eventually result in a deluge of spam.

Instead of [everything]@example.com, I set up [everything]@yo.example.com. Discovering subdomains is much harder and the one time I encountered a form that didn't like a subdomain, I just made a forwarding address on my main domain.

Using Fastmail's rules, I have a setup where every message arriving to @yo.example.com gets shunted into a folder unless there's a different rule putting it somewhere else.

> Discovering subdomains is much harder...

Is this because you don’t publish MX records in DNS for the subdomains and the default setting on the main domain is to accept only specific addresses (and reject catch-all addresses)?

Personally I haven't been hit with spam to truly random addresses with my catchall. Is that a common issue people run into?

The spam I've received on my catchall is either based on previously breached sites (which I once signed up to) or to very common mailbox names (e.g. postmaster@, info@). I just add those to an auto-reject postfix filter based on the intended recipient, which keeps my inbox very clean.

Years ago I just set up some filters. There's only about 5-10 email addresses that get hammered with SPAM.

Gmail handles the rest.

Same. Catch all aliases are the way to go.

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