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Comment by varenc | Hacker News Reader

I registered the "very-secure-no-viruses.email" domain to use for burner emails. I was trying to make one that sounded maximally sketchy. It has lead to some confusing interactions with support though...

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I have firstname@lastname.email... people keep telling me that can't be right and don't i mean it ends with email.com?

I have a .ninja email and get the same a lot to the extend where I explicitly say "it ends in .ninja with no .com or anything".

Usually use company-i-buy-from@mydomain.ninja whenever I make online purchases, and I had a guy from a small shop call me up and ask why I had an email with his company name on. Took some good fifteen minutes to explain him that I was legit and owned the domain. He was still reluctant in the end, but eventually ended the conversation with something along the lines of "it's your problem, not mine, if the parcel won't reach you for using a fake email" :)

I used to use this company-i-buy-from strategy, but i got accused of fakery a lot, until I tried a new strategy -- interest@domain.dev. So if i were buying from REI, i would use camping@domain.dev or if i were ordering office supplies i would use officemgmt@domain.dev. It's slightly less obvious what you're doing, and raises fewer questions.

People will still ask if you work in the 'interest' sector, but it is still better than having to explain why their company name is in your e-mail address.

Haha yeah I used to give realtors "realty@domain.dev" and I used to get a lot of dirty looks ... I think they thought I was competition

Ha! Exactly this happens to me too. Had to return some electronics in person, the guy suddenly started fishing if I was some mystery shopper or QC person... because the invoice was made out to their.store@myname.email

That said I've caught and blacklisted quite a few bad actors this way, AND filtering is easier. So worth the occasional weird interaction.

> their.store@myname.email

I did this for a decade and decided it was't worth it, nor the plus in gmail addresses.

It was a ton of effort remembering which address I used (I have multiple domains, too, oh joy).

I would end up with multiple accounts on websites, and support calls were super painful.

Eventually I switched providers and realized that in all that time I literally never found any "smoking gun" of a company selling my info.

And the plus email addresses were super useless because spammers know they can just strip out the bit after the plus. Duh.

In fact, my "real" email address that kept super secret and never ever ever gave to anyone except real in-the-flesh human friends (and thus never got any real email to, lol) was by far and away the most compromised email address. Stratospherically compromised.

Turns out most of the human population do not understand the difference between the local part and the domain part. I’ve had this too. They ask if I work there because I have store.name@myname.com. No , go and read the RFCs…

> That said I've caught and blacklisted quite a few bad actors this way

same! A long time ago I registered an adobe account with the email "<username>+fsck_adobe@gmail.com"

Adobe then got hacked and their account database leaked. Later I got a personalized spam email for a dating site sent to the same +fsck_adobe@gmail email. I complained, and they claimed innocence, saying they got the email from some sort of contact lead service. I then got in touch with that contact lead service's CEO, and of course he had "no idea" how that email got in there. I'm sure they knew very well how it got in there, and after I reported it, they just removed everything after a "+" on @gmail.com emails...

i practiced this email address scheme for a short period, then switched to ${my_initials}${few_digit_digest($other_party)}@${my_domain} $other party being a webshop, an online service, an institution, or a person.

then to ${my_initials}${random_few_digits}@${my_domain} to be able to hand out pre-generated email addresses of mine even offline, and bookkeep who has got which random number at my side internally.

this raised the least eyebrows so far.

I have used the company-i-buy-from in my email address I give the for over 20 years. It mostly works well, a couple of serious businesses had their data stolen and are now blocked and I use a secondary address for them if I still have a need. Never noticed a spammer would misuse the scheme, even though it would be extremely easy.

The funniest experience was when searching a VoIP provider. One had it in their terms that their name must not be part of the email address. Well, no chance to get my business then.

Same... I had my Luma.com account closed and disabled because of my "suspicious" email... had to ask a friend to get it back.

I read the same story from either you or someone else before. Crazy.

I have a .co domain and noticed that some people think it’s a typo and adjust it to .com

I use [vendor name]@[mycustomdomain].com which is a catch-all email, [anything]@[mycustomdomain].com goes to my inbox, so if I use something like disney@[mycustomdomain].com and then I have to talk to someone on the phone about an order and they ask for my email address, they invariably get confused and think I work for the company or something like that. Then I have to explain that I use the company's name in the email address so I can track who is selling my email. They don't understand it but I'll keep explaining it until they just accept it and move on.

I have first@last.family. I've had that issue and my family doesn't want to use it; mostly they'd rather have first.last@Gmail.com, and my dad thinks it should be @firstlast.com or first@last.com (never mind that last.com is in use)

I have had a .xyz email for like 10 years at this point. It's 50/50 of people saying "is that really a email address" and people acting completely normal.

Never going to know what reaction I'm going to get.

Oh, you must mean firstnamelastname@gmail.com.

I used to have [firstname]@gmail.com when gmail was in beta. They took it back when they went live :(

i have a .dev domain and i get the same thing all the time

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