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Comment by yx827ha | Hacker News Reader

Fastmail's masked emails are great! I honestly very rarely give out my "real" email. Usually when I sign up for something I create a masked email, or if I need an email on the spot I use a wildcard alias (xxxxxx@myalias.fastmail.com). Since most of my emails are random, it serves as an authentication additional factor.

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The problem is that it only takes one entity to leak the real email. All my spam comes on my real email despite using aliases for years.

I need to retire my real email address, but it'a bit tricky because I also used it for important things.

Haven't quite worked out how to solve that yet.

Start now with a forward from the old address. Might take multiple years before you are confortable deleting the old address.

You may be right there. Will have a think about it. Maybe a filter to flag things and update as needed.

I went from using Gmail for 10-15 years to catch-all using my own domain name with Fastmail. It took a couple of years to slowly make the switch, but it was worth it. I still monitor the Gmail just in case and it's not a big deal, especially since you can fetch it (and send from it) with Fastmail (I just keep a Gmail tab open to report spam).

I've been using simple vendor-specific aliases e.g. $VENDOR.$MyInitials@fastmail.com, or a shared spam bucket alias.

Can you remind us how fastmail's subdomains, and "masked emails" are an improvement?

1. it allows associating a description with the address, which could contain any annotation information you'd like

2. it has a handy delete option, for severing the relationship

3. when they do arrive in the inbox, it shows the annotation instead of the address because no sane person could remember what battery.horse.staple@fastmail corresponds to

Don’t de email domains get blacklisted or are they valid?

It's just fastmail.com, that would be insane to blacklist. Also you don't really use these for sending, it's more for signing up for things and online shopping.

It certainly still happens though. [0]

[0] https://www.fastmail.com/blog/the-internet-blacklist/

Most of the generalized aliasing domains get blacklsited. If you are going to do aliasing set it against your custom domains.

From what I can tell: Atlasian and Stackoverflow try to reject you based on your mx records on the domain (which makes that a problem)

There are a few other companies that try to restrict you to gmail or hotmail domains. (Which is even more frustrating)

iCloud’s HideMyEmail service generates @icloud.com addresses. Very easy, single click.

Nevertheless, I still use my personal name at lastname dot com for everything for decades and amount of spam is quite tolerable. Rarely it leaks into inbox. It’s even published on my personal web site in plain text.

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