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Comment by sbf501 | Hacker News Reader

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sbf501·

> Placing a companies name in the address will signal a canary and they may likely filter

Oh, good point. I guess I may have invalidated all my research! :|

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But you’ve stumbled on an even better solution! Now you are spam free + tracking free.

On the other hand, your address is being filtered out, so... win? :D

If you're interested in getting "true" results, perhaps you could do something like this:

name1@website.com

name2@website.com

etc.

In a spreadsheet, you have one column with the number, and another with the company name. You might want to change this up, putting the identifier in different parts of the email address, to avoid similar "canary" signals.

Personally, I use BitWarden to generate usernames for each website, to help keep my fingerprint (somewhat) scrambled. LastPass also has a good username generator. [1] I would just avoid using complete non-sense words, since there might be some amount of human review.

[1] https://www.lastpass.com/features/username-generator

Reading these over the phone to dinosaur financial institutions is pretty unfun though. I was doing something similar with generated usernames, had to call in to reset my password because some places operate like it's still 1983, and the person helping me probably thought I was nuts with my 30+chr random username.

Sounds like you use Bank of America, too!

I had to read my e-mail address to someone there just last week.

I had this experience with a different bank (with an embarrassing email address). I wonder if there's some compliance thing here for banks.

Just writing their name in reverse would probably work, and be less time consuming.

Only if you actually want to receive their spam for research purposes.

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