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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

Your vision is further than fastmail can currently take you, but a partial solution which I use is to just give out a unique email address to each company. that way when you get spam you can disable that address for future use and also use it as a conversation starter with whoever leaked your data to a spammer.

The format I use is {yourname}@{myname}.{mydomain}, so there's a unique address for every pair--some of which I've disabled delivery for.

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are you aware that comments are a thing in email addresses ?

john.smith(comment)@example.com

there are also tags

john.smith+sometag@example.com

neither of these require any DNS or server muckery and _should_ be supported by major mail hosts.

Of course, who knows how many random half-assed email validation things people have in their forms that'll prevent you from entering them.

And spammers will happily remove those bits from the address.

Yes, but many email marketers know this trick and they just strip out the comment or tag, or else make you give them an address that doesn't have it.

Even worse: Some of them happily accept such addresses, but some time later, silently drop messages to you while claiming that they were sent.

The obvious solution would be to use john.smith+me@example.com and treat john.smith@example.com as a semi-spam folder

Yup, since I'm using my own domain domain I use kevincox@ for public sharing and generated emails for sharing with companies. Therefore there is no obvious path from the email I give them (which bypasses the spam filter and can be revoked) to my general email address. Although it is easy to find my general address online it is fairly heavily spam-filtered. And unknown address is subject to an very harsh filter if it wants to end up in my inbox.

So basically there are three tiers:

- Single relationship emails. Guaranteed delivery until revoked.

- General inbox.

- Unknown to addresses, unlikely to hit the inbox.

(The address are actually signed and blacklisted rather than generated+revoked but that is just an implementation detail)

Comments aren't semantically meaningful, anyone can strip them out without changing the meaning of the email address.

Do you have the system automated? Meaning: if I send email right now to {somerandomstring}@{yourname}.{yourdomain} does it get automatically rejected, or flagged? And if yes, how do you add {myname} to your whitelist?

Both Gmail and Fastmail supports "+something" in the local part of your email address, so you can just add a foo+*@domain filter to block everything or move it to a folder, and then add a foo+someapprovedsender@domain filter before it for anyone you want to reach your inbox.

Almost every provider (social media, banks, websites and spammers) also know this, and routinely remove anything after + in @gmail addresses.

Indian Retirement Fund website, NPS, government operated, will take your abc+nps@gmail.com at signup, no errors, but will not let you login saying, Email Not Found. You have to login with abc@gmail.com to get in your account.

All the places I've given addresses like that dutifully e-mails to the right place, so I guess I must've gotten lucky. But if you use your own domain with Fastmail (which I'd recommend anyway, so you have an easy way of moving elsewhere if you need to - how I was able to migrate to Fastmail from Google relatively painlessly in the first place) you can also set up catchall addresses so you can use the whole local-part instead:

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277942-Ca...

Fastmail supports both yourname+foo@example.com and foo@yourname.example.com. I use the latter precisely to avoid the problem of sites that don't play well with plus addresses.

I'm not GP but use a similar system. I just set up a global forwarding rule for the domain using forwardemail.net. The default is to let it through. If I get a spam message I'll check the "to" field in gmail and can quickly see who it was that sold it or leaked it. Can also create a rule in gmail to send to trash or can even add a forwarding rule for that inbox if needed in forwardemail

For my hosted E-Mail I've configured one inbox as "catch all unknown". This allows me to "generate" e-mail addresses on the fly without any configuration (at least receiving). Once one of the addresses / aliases was burnt for some reason I could make a separate postbox of it with all blocking rules and dead end for spam. This is a quite comfortable way for me, although the emails are not flagged in any way. They will come through in any case and I postponed the the work to any malicious event.

I (with self hosted config) went a step further and made mail+<tagname>@domain.com ones go into a tag/<tagname> subdirectory

I have fastmail configured to accept *@{my name}.{my domain} and then I have a rule for each blocked sender. So it's it opposite of the logic that you want: I'll receive they mail until I explicitly block you.

This is still not implicit block like you're after, but when I looked through the settings to see how I had it configured I discovered this integration with 1password: https://1password.com/fastmail/

which, now that I know about, I may start using.

At least from the promo video that seems very much like Apple's "supply a unique email" feature. Which is better than nothing, but waaaaay less feature-ful and much more manual than my ideal setup.

Ideally it would be {keysigned_string}@{yourname}.{yourdomain}

This is basically what I do. {tag}-{signature}@{domain}.

The upside is that it is easy to generate new addresses, I don't need to talk to my mailserver. The small number of addresses that need to be revoked are manually added to a backlist.

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