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Comment by u801e | Hacker News Reader

I provide my email address with the +companyname suffix on the local part as a way to filter my email into various folders based on the To header contents.

Unfortunately, many websites are configured to reject email addresses that contain a plus character. I've also encountered websites in the past that did accept the + character when creating the account where the email address serves as the user name, but then could not log in because their log in form rejected the + character in the user name.

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I got sick of companies rejecting email with "+", and bought a domain to use for email (among other reasons). Now I've got a wildcard entry in DNS, so any valid local part gets routed to my inbox. So instead of "username+company@example.com" I can do "company@example.com".

That causes weird behaviour in places, where they assume the bit before the @ is a "username".

I've been using an own domain with wildcard emails for many years now. I'm yet to encounter a single scenario of inferred names.

I've been using this strategy for years and have not encountered that issue before. That would mean the part before the @ would have to be unique across all domains. That doesn't make any sense. You couldn't have webmaster@domain1.com and webmaster@domain2.com registered for example.

Or ben@gmail.com and ben@hotmail.com couldn't both be registered. This scheme is so obviously flawed I can't imagine it's widely implemented.

What provider do you use for email? That does sound nice.

I've tried something similar with Fastmail, and it works out well for the most part. I have ran into more than a couple services which won't accept email addresses not on a whitelisted domain for some reason and I had to use an @gmail.com address which forwards to my domain.

Out of curiosity, are those popular services? I'm in process of setting up email on my own domain and it would suck having to fallback to Gmail if some service uses an accepted list of domains.

fastmail is reasonably popular. Gmail is bigger, but fastmail is big enough that they cannot be ignored, unlike when I ran my own personal server and often found myself in blacklists without any knowable way to get off.

I've had a couple places not take my .us domain, but almost everything is fine with my .org. The places I've run into that are really picky don't like gmail or other free email providers.

The one exception is Craigslist; if I email someone with my normal email, I never get a response. I always use gmail for that.

In the UK, my domain name provider offers free e-mail forwarding for (I think) 10 specific e-mail address, plus a catch-all forwarder for anything else. Works quite well.

I use migadu for this.

I also use greg-*@domain instead of *@domain, since their docs claim that setting up *@domain tends to attract more spam.

Another Migadu user here slowly degoogling myself. $19 a year is a bargain for my usage and the features I get.

Also a migadu user, I'm a huge fan and can't speak highly enough of them. Their pricing model is a perfect fit for me and their support address is really quick to respond.

Huh, how did I not ever hear/find out about this when I was choosing a provider... I think this is the first time I've seen them mentioned on HN, despite searching through quite a few de-googling threads. Will definitely take a closer look!

mailbox.org also provides the functionality to use your own domain and a have a wildcard entry, where all emails go into your inbox.

I use ProtonMail and sign up to everything with <service>@<custom-domain> so I can track what they do with my email.

It's not cheap from PM, and there are loads of hosting providers that will provide catch-all email for free with your hosting package (but with some usually pretty poor webmail client) or if you use a mail client it should work too.

I like having good webmail and mail app and other things so I pay, but there are plenty of good options available. Sadly self-hosting email server is not really an option for a variety of reasons, but you should easily be able to use catch-all e-mail addresses.

Fastmail supports it. The best part about fastmail is that you can reply from the same address you got the email for. This is useful in customer service scenarios that identify your account based on email address.

The reply part is somewhat new. I had to delete and re-add the wildcard to get it on my old (circa 2013) account, but very nice to have

My time to shine! https://btmiller.com/2019/12/12/regain-control-over-your-inb...

The paid version of gmail (google workspace/gsuite) offers this as well (they call it "aliases"). I haven't explored the option myself, but I do recall seeing something like this in the admin panel. Whether they charge for it or not is probably something I should look into.

At some point, I need to migrate away from google and build out my own personal mail server.

https://forwardemail.net/ is fantastic if all you want is to forward domains somewhere else.

It's a freemium model, but I've never needed anything in the paid tier

I'm on fastmail.

I ended up giving up on that after one too many websites rejecting my custom domain (which I’m the only one using) on signup. These lazy / ignorant colleagues are annoying -_-‘

I've been using a similar scheme for about 7 years now and have never had my email rejected by a website on signup.

The American Kennel Club rejected mine because the domain was “too similar” to their name. I guess just because it had a “kc” in it? Completely bewildering.

I use this scheme (company@mydomain.com) and one that I remember blocking for this reason is Aliexpress/Alibaba - aliexpress@mydomain.com was rejected so I use ali@mydomain.com.

No idea what sort of security this is supposed to provide.

It happens rarely, but some only accept a very limited number of domains (ie Gmail, Outlook, etc).

They probably see it as some sort of security / anti-spam mechanism.

I use a .xyz domain for my personal email, and I sort of regret it.

My emails have a tendency to become spam filter bycatch, to the point that when I was job hunting last year I'd have to ring people after I sent them my resumes etc. to confirm they actually received my email.

And when I give people my email address, I usually have to assure them that steve@stevetech.xyz is a legitimate email address and not a joke (it's not actually steve, but you get the point).

I host my own email server, and .xyz is one of the 2 or 3 TLDs I went in the config files and manually blocked since nothing but spam comes from it (and lots of it).

Definitely would not recommend using it for your personal address.

Can you explain the DNS part? AFAIK the sender just looks for MX on the domain itself, regardless of local part.

The actual address in the email header should still contain the subdomain though.

The address "company@example.com" doesn't point to a subdomain, though, the only reference to the company is the local part of the address, and so has nothing to do with DNS.

If he said he used "joe@company.example.com", then it's possible he has a wildcard MX record for *.example.com, but that's not at all what he said, although perhaps it's what he meant.

Regardless, the question remains unanswered.

I just set up my mail server to use - rather than +, and don’t encounter this problem.

I was unable to provide my email address for a retail rewards program last week because the input field for the domain was a dropdown in their POS. Not the TLD, the entire part of the email after '@'!

Jeez, wow. How many domains were in that box?

"There are other emails besides gmail and hotmail? Woah!" - the person who thought that was a good idea, probably.

There is absolutely no way that someone who thought building a dropdown for email domain name is a good idea wasn't putting AOL and Yahoo! as the first two options.

Yes this is terrible. On the other hand, if your goal is to prevent people from signing up using disposable domains, the blacklist approach (which I have tried before) is a never ending game of whack a mole.

Sounds like this was in person at store though which is extra weird because seems unlikely that scammers would be trying to sign up en masse at a physical location (unlike if the form is connected to the internet)

Until about a decade ago, this was extremely common in Japan. RIP mobile email, another victim of smartphones in general and the iPhone in particular

I used this wonderful trick to sign up for my government issued eID (it was something else but works for explaining). What they decided to do is to simply remove the + and don’t let me know about it.

my_email+service@foo.bar thus became my_emailservice@foo.bar

I tried logging in, resetting passwords, nothing worked. I had to go to the authorities and make a written request to allow them to interrogate the database by the equivalent of my social security number, and that’s when we realized they just stripped the +.

Fastmail allows for companyname@youraccount.fastmail.com -style addresses. Even for your own domains.

Much more reliable than the + -thing, which breaks in the weirdest of places.

I've been using fastmail for years and didn't know that. Thanks!

Ages ago, back in myspace days, their system would permit + when creating an account, but could not handle this in their forgot password / password reset system. I never was able to delete my account because of this.

Sony's SEN used to have an account creation page that would permit +, but subsequent sign-in interpreted it as a URL-encoded whitespace. No login for you

lol you should have tried to enter a URL-encoded plus sign, %2B.

All social media accounts are delectable on a long enough timescale.

As it happens, it was eventually done for me:

https://mashable.com/article/myspace-data-loss/

I use Fastmail with my own domain name and unlimited email inboxes, so I use companyname@mydomain.com to sort incoming mail.

I do the same thing and believe it or not I’ve seen websites reject emails with their own name in the email.

I recently got a letter from a companies' law department and had to explain the whole thing :D

I had one do that. When I give the address in person I get "do you work here?"

I had to switch my hosting provider at one point because they stopped supporting catch-all. I have no idea how many "addresses" I've used, since I don't create a specific email for each, so I had to get new hosting (note: this was over 10 years ago)

If you use Gmail here's a fallback option: Gmail ignores "." in the local part. So foo.bar is the same as f.ooba.r to Gmail. Obviously quite limited and more hassle to keep track of.

One of my primary pet peeves with Gmail. It leads to a lot more junk mail arriving in my inbox. My real Gmail address is 'first.m.last', and almost all the spam I get is addressed to 'firstmlast'. Gmail is great at filtering out spam so that I don't see most of it, but if not for their unconventional filtering of recipients, I'd get even less. I also get a lot of email from idiots who don't know their own address and provide mine instead, and literally all of that would bounce without their . handling.

Same here. I send everything that is firstlast@gmail straight to junk.

> I also get a lot of email from idiots who don't know their own address

Holy crap there are a lot of them. I've got one bank sending me the dude's statements. He's also been on some interesting trips, seen all his hotel stays, etc.

Same. I don't have a very common name but there are at least two other people who share it. One has used my GMail address to apply for jobs and for his unemployment benefits. I'm guessing he isn't having much luck with either one.

The other finally figured it out but his wife still hasn't after more than a decade. It gets really old receiving reminders to service a vehicle I've never owned from a dealership 2000 miles away among other similar crap.

I thought it would be nice to have my name without numbers as my gmail, but with all the stories i've heard, I think i'm glad I have the numbers now.

This pattern is often abused by spambots trying to avoid dupe detection, so using it excessively may lead to your login being treated as spam.

I use a catch-all to have a <website>@<mydomain>.com login for every website.

Samsung doesn't accept emails with "samsung" as prefix, so I have samsun@mydomain.com for them. I have no idea what's the logic behind.

I use reverse DNS notation for the local part. So that would be "com.samsung@mydomain.com" in my case.

I got sick of + not being accepted and switched to using - for all my aliases, which works everywhere I've tried. It's annoying, but practical (assuming you run your own mail server, or have the ability to manage it client-side).

Plenty of hosted solutions support wildcard - including GSuite and Fastmail.

Ditto, with the same hassles mentioned by you and others, such that I'm actively looking at email services that handle this sort of thing better using approaches such as mentioned below - domain@mydomain style registration addresses.

You can have unlimited handles with fastmail if you're looking for that

I find that a lot of website don't allow + sign precisely because of Gmail usage.

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