Hacker News Reader

Comment by rudyfink | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind sharing your experience on how well that has worked for you? Has the complexity of maintaining different addresses been a problem?

I ask because it is something I have always thought about, but I suppose I kept hoping a service would come along and magic the solution for me. Kudos on making it happen!

View on HN

I'm not OP but I do something similar, which I can describe. I don't whitelist addresses, I have a domain with a catchall account. So I make up addresses as needed. When I want them to die, I add them to a ruleset on the server that punts them into the bit bucket.

So far it has been really great. Easy, effective.

Edit: Like the other reply you got, I use FastMail for this service.

Here’s a good guide on how to go about this :)

https://btmiller.com/2019/12/12/regain-control-over-your-inb...

Dito, have been doing the same with a selfhosted mailcow for years. Never had a problem :-) Lately I started switching over to account+labels@domain.tld style because of the automated organization so I don't need extra routing rules if I want to organize them.

Except for the sites that reject the + character in email. I curse those developers who do that and never go back to that site again.

I do something similar and also use FastMail. I use <site-name>@sites.<my-domain> for all site signups, eg news.ycombinator.com@sites.example.com

Not OP, but I just accept wildcard *@mydomain and give out a unique name for every business. Works very well and I blocked a few businesses by which do not allow for opt-out and/or shared my address with others.

This is easy to do with the Alias feature of FastMail.

Yeah I do the same thing with FastMail - its awesome.

Here is a recent story where this came in handy.

I recently had a spam phone call from someone fishing for personal information, using a 'survey' as cover. During the call I learned that they had my email address as 'ledger@xxxx.xxx'. This must have come from the Ledger data breach (https://www.ledger.com/message-ledgers-ceo-data-leak). This made the call even more nefarious than I originally thought... nothing I can do, they have that email address and my personal number. Just made me more aware of what is going on.

That’s terrifying.

There is a service for that: https://anonaddy.com/

I've used it briefly for testing purposes and I have no complaints about it, it delivered what I expected with no hiccups.

Adding another comparable offering is https://simplelogin.io and you can set a PGP key for forwarded emails.

I did it for ages and eventually stopped. It gets awkward when you have to deal with customer support people and I never caught any spammers via the method anyway. Difficulty wise it was trivial since all emails hit my main address.

When I can tell it'll be awkward, I just make up some letters on the spot like "gj5@mydomain.com". It's easy enough to look for To:gj5 in your horded mail to find out what business it was.

I've done this too before, weird thing to have to do but sometimes people just don't get it. Although, nine times out of ten I get asked if I work at that business because the first bit of my email address is their business name.

I use anonaddy for this. A generous free plan, really feasible paid plans, and is open source so you can self-host it as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com