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Comment by mehrshad | Hacker News Reader

For those with vanity URLs and GMail - the trick I use to manage unsubscribes better is to enable 'catch-all address' and registering for new accounts by their URL and TLD, e.g. news_ycombinator_com@URL.com, or kennethcole_com@URL.com, etc.

Two benefits - 1) easier to remember my login per site and 2) if I start getting spammed as a result of my info being shared with third-parties, I can attribute the original offender to the e-mail address.

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Also a good way to get vast amounts of dictionary attack spam. One of the mail domains I host was accepting mail to all addresses for some years, and this seems to have attracted even more spam: the volume of junk it gets is disproportionately huge compared to the other similar domains.

My mail server allows -- as an alternative to + so my users can work around braindead address regexes.

You also get few hundred "new viagra price" in your spam folder sent to HjvhBYgVqJ@your.domain. You'll never find kennethcole_com@your.domain in that mess. Even worse is that you get bounced spam emails sent to some@guy.com with from header sent to HjvhBYgVqJ@your.domain and spam filter doesn't see them as spam.

Also, assuming the site isn't brain-dead and invalidating the address, you can use email+site@gmail.com with any gmail or google apps address.

That + is frequently a cause of contention though, so I use a . (which was done via config when I ran my own mail server days gone by) and also have a catchall on google apps.

If I were selling my database to spammers I would process my entire list to remove everything between the plus and the at sign.

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