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Comment by codecutter | Hacker News Reader

This is a great idea and I would like to use it. However, I have only the house number and street address. What can I do in that case?

PS: I generate separate emails already. Example: somebusiness@mydomain.com However, I have not found a single case where they leaked my email address, so I am not sure if it helps for spam and privacy.

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I separate emails, a different address for each company/organisation I deal with. Since I started in 2002, I have found multiple instances of leaked or sold email addresses. My Dropbox one was leaked for sure, as that was quite public, and some of the others seem sold, as the companies seem a bit fly-by-night (of course that may also mean they're clueless about security). One reputable-seeming one I contacted about it claimed they hadn't had a data breach, which I think probably just means they weren't aware of it. I've also had an address scraped and then copied manually from a classified ad - they left out the first letter when they copied and pasted, but I still get it since I have a catch-all!

I do the separate-email thing too and my spambox is chock full of emails to leaked addresses. The leaks seem mostly from large, upstanding companies that have had data breaches (Adobe, Myspace, ...), rather than from deliberate email address sales. It's still very handy to be able to just disable an email address... can't do that if you've used the same registration email on 1000 sites.

I imagine you could just still just use "Unit XYZ" or whatever.

If it confuses your delivery folks and it's the same people every day, just explain it to them to ignore that, but most likely they'll just ignore the Unit stuff and leave the package at your door as usual.

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