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Comment by nobody9999 | Hacker News Reader

>Every entity I need to give an address to gets a unique, randomly-generated one. I figured this would let me spot the leaks.

I do the same, except I don't use a randomly generated address. Rather, I use something that identifies who it is. e.g., if I had a relationship with Tesla, the email address would be 'tesla@myemaildomain'.

What (if anything) is the advantage of using a randomly generated email address over the scheme I use?

N.B., I'm not dissing your strategy at all. I do exactly the same. I'm just curious about the "randomly generated" bit.

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When I started, I wanted the addresses to look as innocuous as possible in order to avoid unnecessary explanations. Filling out paperwork that people hand inspect is one case where that can cause issues. I have also heard of people getting filtered as potential spam accounts when the email address matches the service name or whatnot.

Anyway, I just use pwgen to generate plausible-looking addresses: pwgen -A0 10 1. They often look like realistic abbreviations of names.

Thanks! It makes sense, but I'm too lazy to bother.

I haven't seen my email get filtered, even after more than a decade, but I suppose it could happen.

If I do run into something like that, I can always fall back on pwgen. Thanks again!

"I have also heard of people getting filtered as potential spam accounts when the email address matches the service name or whatnot."

I have heard of that as well but many years in I have not experienced it.

I do the same thing the person you are responding to does:

nameofservice@domain.com

... and they all just go to my inbox with a descriptive tag in the subject that I insert with procmail.

Not the parent commenter, but I've encountered “people from the counterparty organization get confused and wonder whether you're part of it too / pretending to be part of it too”. This can be mitigated with some obscuring transformation.

>Not the parent commenter, but I've encountered “people from the counterparty organization get confused and wonder whether you're part of it too / pretending to be part of it too”. This can be mitigated with some obscuring transformation.

A fair point. Thanks!

Personally, I can't be bothered and when (not if -- the scenario you've outlined has happened with me) folks get confused, I just explain that I do it to fight spam and they generally just nod agreeably. Whether they get it or not isn't my concern -- knowing whose user database has been pwned is.

> I do the same, except I don't use a randomly generated address. Rather, I use something that identifies who it is. e.g., if I had a relationship with Tesla, the email address would be 'tesla@myemaildomain'. > I almost use the methodology except I add ramdom characters at the end. Tesla.ahcdk@domain.com

Reasoning is that its most likely if you have tesla@ you will have facebook@ tesco@. When adding characters you can filter on the . + 4 characters

>Reasoning is that its most likely if you have tesla@ you will have facebook@ tesco@. When adding characters you can filter on the . + 4 characters

I get you, and it's a good idea if you're using someone else's domain (e.g., gmail.com, protonmail.com, etc.) to make sure you have a unique email address.

Since I own -- and host my own domain for my emails (as does the OP, IIRC), that's not necessary, as the domain name itself makes the email address unique -- since I'm the only one who uses it. As such, I can (and do) just filter on 'facebook', 'tesla' and 'tesco' directly.

I heard facebook doesn't allow emails with "facebook" in them. Alternatively you can give facebook.te@ address to tesla and tesla.fb@ address to facebook, nobody will figure it out :)

>I heard facebook doesn't allow emails with "facebook" in them.

Where, exactly, did you hear that?. I can confirm that's not the case.

My FB email address is a bare 'facebook@myemaildoman' and hasn't been a problem. Ever.

That said, I set that as my FB email address more than a decade ago, so I guess things may have changed since then.

I would guess just speed of creating the addresses/not having to worry about using same address twice accidentally

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