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Comment by thebean11 | Hacker News Reader

I try to disguise it a little to avoid the awkwardness, and also put the recipient into the subdomain instead of sender name. For example for grubhub I'd do:

me@grb.mydomain.com

No need to remember anything because it's all in a password manager. I've found this worthwhile, already blocked a couple spammers.

You could also go with something fully random, you still get the same benefit. It's easy to look in your email history and see what you originally used the email address for. Password manager obviously required though.

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Nice! I tried this a few years ago, and while this worked nicely for inbound email, deliverability outbound was really bad, even with DKIM etc. set. Normal mails from <my domain> were fine.

I guess "amazon.<my domain>" got quite the phishing score at the time, so good call using grb instead of grub. :D

Yeah deliverability is a good point. I'm usually only using this trick for services where I wouldn't be sending outbound email luckily. Normal emails come from mydomain.com.

Using custom subdomains for each account is a great idea. Once you start getting spam on this subdomain, you just need to remove the DNS entry and the spammer's attempts to deliver spam will be unsuccessful (versus if you use different local part names, you have to filter / reject the mails explicitly).

That’s exactly how I’ve been doing it for more than a decade. (Without the subdomain part but with the disguising.) I feel it’s been worth it so far.

Note some services won't even recognize a subdomain email address as valid.

Really? Wouldn't that catch people with `.co.uk` or similar localized domains?

They use a regex such as /[a-z]+(\.[a-z]{2,3}){1,2}/

There’s a lot of bad email validation regexes floating around on the internet. If it’s an older service it may have been written before gTLDs.

I have an address that ends in .fyi and continue to encounter systems that refuse to accept it as a valid domain. It's really frustrating but at least I have a .com that I can enter into those and just forward it.

Technically .co.uk is a TLD [1], not a subdomain.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Public_Suffix_List

Yup, I've been rejected from a couple things, but it works for the vast majority

What do you use to manage all the subdomains?

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