Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It | Hacker News Reader

Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

nytimes.com

16 pointsxrayarx20 comments

The best thing I did very long ago was to have my own domain, partly for the purpose of having "infinity email addresses." I find it very interesting how this didn't catch on. I wonder if perhaps the Fediverse, etc., might re-spark an interest in something along these lines for more people.

If you don't mind, what email solution do you use? Self-hosted? Some cloud solution?

Not the OP, but a .com domain costs me about $12/yr and fastmail.com costs me about $50/yr and I get unlimited email addresses as a result (catch-all).

Not the commenter, but cloudflare email routing works well w/ a $1/year xyz domain (random 6 -9 digit domains are discounted). It's worth noting that this might not be as private as iCloud or mozilla's solutions, as you share a domain with all other costumers. On the other hand, people have held onto domains for very long amounts of time, and the system is less susceptible to "it wasn't making enough money so you can't access some of your accounts now".

Last I checked, Cloudflare's email service didn't let you _send_ email, which may or may not matter to you.

How much a year or what’s your bill like for setup and maintenance?

Just so you know, your account is shadowbanned - all of your comments are automatically marked as dead.

I have vouched for this comment, because it seems fine, but you do have somewhat of a history of unsubstantive comments based on my skimming.

If you're willing to put that aside, apologize, and promise to follow the rules in the future, the HN mods are typically willing to unban your account if you reach out to them via email.

Really? Interesting. Honestly, that's probably my cue to go. This place was becoming a bit of an echo chamber anyway.

I don’t know why there isn’t a way to authorize emails / domains coming thru, and reject all unauthorized emails. The amount of spam I get from other people who either forget their email address or purposely send me their email is crazy. Apparently I live in utah, London England, Scotland and Thunder Bay Canada based on the people who regularly sign up under my email address.

I aggressively use iCloud’s autogenerated forwarding addresses for everything now.

Before then I used + separation in my email addresses so that I could at least tell when someone had sold or leaked my email address.

I read somewhere that there’s a limited number of email addresses that you can obtain through iClouds implementation, which, depending on how many services you use it with, you may end up re-using some, which would defeat some of the purpose.

Here’s an example of someone running into this issue: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253666687

I haven't yet, but good to know. thanks!

A Gmail address can have "."s added anywhere in the part before the @ and the resulting emails will still come to your inbox. You can then filter things directly to spam with a simple rule.

Similarly you can add +<string> (eg John+Walmart@gmail.com). Then filter things to specific folders. Better still you can see who is selling your email when you start getting emails to that address. Some places don't permit + symbols in emails though...

Both of these are well known features. And you can "normalize" a Gmail email address - basically stripping your defences.

Yes and no.

First that assumes someone is bothering. Plenty of places don't, as my spam collection shows. It always amazes me how little technical know-how or design goes into high cost solutions.

And second: just reverse the logic: emails to john.doe@gmail.com are whitelisted. All others go to spam. So even if someone is "normalising" it actually works for Mr Doe...

I hope this helps!

The ad industry did bother enough: https://github.com/IABTechLab/uid2docs/blob/main/api/README....

It even reached HN frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34400024

With Fastmail, same effect by different means: Email aliases. Web UX is a bit rough, however.

I’ve been using Fastmail for about 6 months or so, and while I agree it’s a bit different than other providers, it works as intended and gets the job done. It’s actually one of the cleaner and faster (ha) webmail’s I’ve used.

I definitely wouldn’t say that it’s rough, though.

Anyone tried Duck Duck Go Email Protection? Good, bad, ugly?

Using it for over 6 months. Works great, and they remove tracking as well

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