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Comment by smeg | Hacker News Reader

Yep. I don't even use/like Facebook, but I just deleted my 10 year old Yahoo account in protest (in truth it was only a secondary account after Google, but still).

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This is why I use my own domain for my primary email address. If Google decides to pull some kind of crap on me, I can always ditch them without having to write that silly "My new email is" message to all my contacts.

I use a personal email domain on gmail[1] as well.

But for a different reason: It allows a "catch all" email, so I register on every site as <sitedomain.com>@vekslers.org and have my account act as a catch all sink. This allows me to both filter out spamming sources and trace back who leaked my email address to 3rd party sources. This approach is a pivot on the name+tag@domain.com email tagging which most js form validations devs are unaware of it being a legal email syntax and thus do not allow.

This relives me of the need to worry to post my email address, which is news.ycombinator.com_3698017@vekslers.org out in the open (true emails are very much welcome).

[1] http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

I've been doing this for a while. I've caught out 3 companies selling (or leaking, presumably via an employee) my email address. In one case they claimed they'd do something and I never heard a followup (but received no further spam, which could mean the boss was in on it); in the second case the company never bothered replying (Topaz Labs, pretty disappointed with them) and I still receive spam directed towards the address; in the 3rd case I didn't bother doing anything because of the previous 2 experiences - I realised it didn't help much except in the extreme case of being spammed heavily, which so far hasn't actually happened.

I wonder how hard this is to set up if you run your own mail server.. should be pretty easy..

Do you get a lot of spam to addresses like admin@domain ?

I used to run a catchall and the problem wasn't addresses like admin@; it was popular names. Turns out some spammers just take a list of common email local parts and email those names at every domain they can find.

There's a silver lining, though. When I took down my catchall I took the 100 most popular guessed addresses and routed them all to my Bayesian trainer. It was a big help with certain sorts of spam.

This sounds like a good setup (and workaround the name+tag issue). Can regular Gmail handle a catch all or is this a paid feature?

The free Google Apps has catch-all, yes.

> I just deleted my 10 year old Yahoo account in protest

From Apple device?

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