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Comment by iqster | Hacker News Reader

I learned a valuable lesson today ... never give out my true email address to ANYONE! :p But seriously ... do people routinely create aliases for every form they submit on the net? In this case, I had an expectation of privacy. Feeling really screwed now :(

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You are feeling screwed? Because it was disclosed you entered a competition? What were you going to do if you got in, wear a balaclava and talk through some sort of voice altering device to hide your true voice?

And if you don't get in are you afraid that people are going to ridicule you for the rest of your life because your name was in the to list with 500 people?

I appreciate that TC made a mistake, and you would think they might have gone a bit further in preventing this sort of mistake, but I think we have all suffered far worse invasions of privacy than this (half the people on the list probably tweeted that they'd entered anyway).

To clarify: I feel screwed because my previously spam-free mailbox had dozens of messages from recruiters and people wanting to "hustle" (get feedback on their projects, etc.). I generally believe in good karma and offer feedback on HN or Forrst. I am annoyed that people are taking advantage of the TC mistake.

I do - my personal email (I have my own domain) is only given out to personal friends and with the explicit instruction that they better not use it to sign up to competitions or 'tell a friend / share the reward' forms. Some still do of course, but at least gmail's spam filter filters out most of the junk.

For any 'commercial' site or correspondence, I create a unique alias. Well 'create' is too formal, I simply have a catch-all address so I can create 'aliases' on the spur of the moment. I rely on gmail's spam filter to filter out the rubbish and if a particular alias becomes 'compromised', I can create a custom rule that deletes email received at that particular alias.

I do the same. zoneedit.com is a free and very easy way to do this. Register a domain and use zonedit for DNS and email forwarding/filtering.

Spam Gourmet is good for the second case. blah.myname@spamgourmet.com gets forwarded to my real email. I can configure a maximum number of emails that will work before the alias stops functioning.

The only drawback is the domain is not great for dictating over the phone or in person.

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