Hacker News Reader

Comment by armada651 | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking of running a setup like this specifically to rat out who's been selling my e-mail addresses, since the spam would be directed at the service@service.mydomain.com.

Did you find any interesting results from your setup? Some surprising services who sold your address?

View on HN

Not GP but I have the same set up and have only had a couple times where I received unexpected emails to an inbox. One was from GitHub profile scraping, can't remember what the other one was.

One of the surprisingly useful areas is with deliveries. Emails from delivery companies (especially from abroad) often don't specify what it is they're delivering or who it's from. But with this set up I can easily check that with the email address they're sending to, to know who it's from

Can confirm, I'm using the same fastmail setup, same strategy using service@... and no complaints and no spam.

I also use catch-all and no noticeable increase in spam.

Actually, I think it's only happened once or twice in years. I was expecting more spam than I get.

Could also be that random domains aren't that valuable to sell.

And did you find you got much spam to non-existent addresses? I used to use a catch-all setup, and got a large amount of spam, but that must have been 25ish years ago.

Very little.

Could also be that Fastmail has good filtering.

Thanks. I find Fastmail a little worse than Google in terms of spam, but that could just be fluctuations in the amount of spam in general after changing service. (I'm noticing more spam in my work email recently, which uses Google Workspace, too).

name+service@email.com is also a good way to find out. It’s standard and accepted by most sites and most email providers. I use it, didn’t find any proof of service selling my adress except some random Ali express vendor the one and only time I bought here an item I couldn’t find anywhere.

That mechanism is so well known, it’s trivial to undo by removing the +service part. Is it really effective? How would you even find out if it is?

Good point. I'm not sure the bad guys take time to clean the base or even care. But for sure the edgy/grey area one would. Still, i'm more confident about this solution than relay emails from any service (even Firefox) that could potentially lock me out eventually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com