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Comment by meowster | Hacker News Reader

You have to generate addresses before you can use them. That doesn't seem very convenient.

How else would it work? It’s incredibly convenient. The option to create a new email is presented on signup forms, or you can open Hide My Email settings and generate one. I have hundreds of emails this way

> How else would it work?

Like grandparent said: by having a catch-all email address on a domain. Then emails that are being sent to invalid email accounts on that domain end up in that mailbox.

I’m not sure that idea was thought through. An infinite number of addresses that all point to the same inbox is effectively the same as having one address

The point of having multiple addresses delivering to the same mailbox is to be able to use per service custom emails. The grand-grand parent wanted a ticketmaster specific email, so if they sell their data, or it gets leaked, they know from the email address it was from ticketmaster, or another service.

Another commenter in the thread presented how their company "normalizes" gmail addresses by removing "." character and "+..." suffixes, so users don't abuse their system by creating multiple accounts with what is basically the same email. Having a catch-all mailbox allows people to circumvent this "security" measure.

I'm imagining that you actually want to have separate emails pointing to separate mailboxes, and for that case indeed, your solution is better, but for the life of me I can't imagine why anyone would prefer having to check multiple emails, instead of a single one. :D

Yeah I get it, just disagree that it circumvents anything. If emails actually worked this way then leaking the domain would be effectively the same as leaking an email is today. The + scheme doesn’t work because of the aforementioned normalization, and this domain thing wouldn’t work for the exact same reason - whoever had the leaked email could just send an email to <anything-they-want>@<yourdomain> and it’s all the same

At least on iOS, you’re given a “Hide My Email” option when you’re on a sign up page that generates the new address right when you need it.

I've been encountering lately a surprising number of deliverability problems (as in, the emails never arrive) when I try to use "Hidden" icloud emails and Outlook.com aliases. Switching to gmail suddenly confirmations arrive. It's frustrating. Sample size of a few, but I am starting to think that companies who aren't Google are starting to lose the spam war in a way that is leading to blackholing valid messages :(

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