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Comment by mortenlarsen | Hacker News Reader

I use "-" instead of "+" with a regex: "/^name-.*@mydomain\.tld$/". Then I block them when I get spam after they get compromised. Many spammers already know to remove anything after the +-sign.

But I must admit that the biggest benefit of this setup, was listening to my girlfriend on the the phone explaining to someone, at some company, the reason that their name was part of the email-address:

    "That is because if I get SPAM, I know that I can't trust you."
    ...
    "Just make sure that you don't sell it, or get hacked."
    ...
    "If you are already expecting to get hacked, or sell it... why should I do business with you?"

It was priceless.

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I do something similar, it's been fun journey of issues over the years.

One company gave me a free version of their paid offering because my email address was me@them.my.domain, which triggered their "is an employee?" check. (I reported it to a friend who worked there, but they didn't prioritize fixing it. Lasted a while.)

Uber tried to make me change my email address because:

> As much as we appreciate your enthusiasm, and value you as a loyal rider, I do need to ask if you could, please, update your email to something that doesn't use "Uber" in it, as that's technically a trademark violation.

> I apologize for any inconvenience that may cause and thank you for your cooperation. If I can help further with making that change to your email, please let me know.

They backed down, but it was pretty amusing to get this email in response to a totally unrelated one.

Zomato refused the same to me as well, and I use otamoz@ instead. My Uber email is uber@ though, haven’t had any issues.

At least one news website threatened to shut my (expensive) paid account because I was using a "generic" email address, and as such, was likely sharing my credentials.

They insisted I change the email to myname@myname.tld, which was enough in their books to prevent credential sharing.

If you’re self-hosting your mail server and if you are using Postfix, changing recipient_delimiter could do the job without regex.

http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#recipient_delimiter

One minor niggle: I can definitely agree with calling shenanigans if a company doesn't make it clear they have no plans to sell my email address, but honesty about planning to get hacked - from a "this is what we will do" standpoint, but also from a perspective that doesn't flat-out rule out "that will never happen" - is honestly something I would find very refreshing to hear. A lot of environments prioritize mitigating the hypothetical liability risk associated with those kinds of big words rather than communicating that type of boldness that comes across as reassuringly supportive and resilient.

This being said, I wouldn't have minded being a fly on the wall listening to that conversation :P

Clever! Are you running your own email server, or is there a provider/relay other than Google that can route based on regexes?

My own server, since 2001. Regex part since about 2003. It has been very effective, and still is.

The most effective thing back in the day was blocking based on TCP fingerprint, as "Windows XP" was different from "Windows 2003" IIRC (with OpenBSD PF). After that, greylisting gave me a few SPAM-free years, before it became the norm (OpenBSD spamd). Many OpenBSD users had quite a few SPAM-free years back then.

<Insert standard "how are you not being blocked by everyone?!?!" here>

(Genuinely curious - particularly with M$)

The OSS https://forwardemail.net can route based on regex

Because spammers know to remove anything after + or - sign, I've set up an arbitrary sequence of letters so gommmm iai + anything I want will root to gommmm@

I've CS question why I used their company email in my email address and it was fun!

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