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Comment by shuntress | Hacker News Reader

My problem with using email for communicating with strangers is that my email address feels like it must be a closely guarded secret known to only a select few or given out only when there is no other option.

If there was less potential for abuse through spam, scams, or (less likely but still worrying) targeted attacks then I would be much more likely to use email for regular communication outside of work.

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I envy you if you can guard your email address. I have a six digit name and initial of last name Gmail address and I get email for more Pedros with a last name starting with a V that I wanted to know existed. It's so broken... Last week I had to create a new email to sign up for Playstation Whatever because they won't let me "recover" the account someone on Brazil created with my email even though they can't have ever possible validated the email.

This happened to me with someone’s bank account and they didn’t have confirmation so I kept getting emails with pii after that, including the recovery phone number, address, etc. (I alerted the bank to their issue)

I have a first initial last name email from the early days of gmail. The amount of PII and private conversations I've received is incredible. Someone on the other side of the country tried to email himself his business loan application... twice.

Hah that happened to me a few years ago too. HSBC emailed me all the login details for someone’s internet banking account. I emailed back saying they had the wrong email address for their customer. They said if I wanted to change the email address on the account I’d need to go into a branch to do it. It took several attempts back and forth before they finally just disabled internet banking again for that account.

But that was way too much effort. I don’t bother now. My Gmail address (josephg) is a cornucopia of junk. It gets the pay slips from a mechanic, lollypop orders, delivery notifications for shoes, Indian cell phone bills, and all sorts of things. I declared bankruptcy on that account years ago and moved on.

My wife gets emails all the time meant for a particular woman in a different state with the same name as her. For some reason, this other woman consistently uses my wife’s email address. We know where and when her kids go to ballet classes, how much she pays, when she gets Botox, and how much she pays, invoices from her therapist, etc. How does she never notice that none of these emails are going to her and correct the email address she has given out?

I have the same issue with a guy in another state. I know everything he rents from Redbox and everything he buys from harbor freight.

I don't guard mine, but I also don't have a normal name address. Hard to overstate how much that has been a benefit for me.

Buy a domain, use different email addresses for different mailing lists, automatically filter into different folders by To address and list headers.

From my experience, spam/abuse is more likely with addresses used with online shops (the smaller ones seem to get hacked quite often) than with mailing lists.

Think of it this way: The Linux people and many other OSS projects have no problems with mailing lists.

Yeah, I do it like this. Every shopping site has its own domain... shopping.amazon@example.com, shopping.walmart@example.com etc.

> Think of it this way: The Linux people and many other OSS projects have no problems with mailing lists.

That's a very biased view ("many people work like that so they like it") and I disagree.

I think that email based development is a fence to contribution. At least for myself.

Despites being of that generation, I really started contributing to open source when the GitHub model appeared (and previously in the Perl world thanks to rt.cpan.org, a ticketing system with both web and e-mail interfaces). I prefer to have communication centered about one project to be hosted with all the other data about the project instead of having everything in my inbox.

Few open source projects start nowadays with a mailing list based development process. I can't even cite one.

> Few open source projects start nowadays with a mailing list based development process. I can't even cite one.

Most of the projects on https://sr.ht/ (basically all that aren't only mirrored there from somewhere else) do (as it did itself).

Why not have another email address for less private uses then? Spams and scams are everywhere and imo email filterings is good enough to snuff out most these days, unlike DMs on social media (the junk in my reddit "chat" inbox is insane).

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