Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Been doing this for years, and surprised he didn't seem to mention the other benefit: "infinity" email addresses. Oh, rando burger spot wants an email for some free fries? Great, hit me up at randoburgerspot@"mydomain".com .

View on HN

I do this, too - but I've been running into more and more companies that block you from using their company name in the email address.

It also results in awkward conversations if you have to talk to staff. I had ordered some pet supplies online a while ago registered like this.

Then I go in store more recently and they ask "Do you have an account with us?", I give them that email when asked, which causes them to pause. We went around a few times of them asking what my email was, before getting a manager who thought I was doing something dodgy and decided to try looking up my account by phone number instead of email.

That’s pretty funny.

If you use a password manager you could obviously just put something random instead of the company name.

Or just rot13 or some scheme like that.

KISS, just add dot somewhere.

No try giving that email at the store.

I meant the password manager would just be to help you keep track of the names. The names themselves don't have to be long (e.g. `s11@mydomain.com`).

Ohhh good point. So many sites basically only accept gmail + some other popular provider.

I‘m following this scheme for years now and frankly never found a site that only accepts selected providers.

AliExpress is one of them, as far as I know

AliExpress uses my custom domain, but wouldn't accept anything with "aliexpress" in the local part.

Correct, so I used "aliexpres" instead, which works.

A lot of asian genai startups are pretty picky and want emails from bigger providers. kling, qwen, hunyuan just to name a few.

Just create a gmail account specifically for it if that's the case.

Same experience, but a different perception. I’ve always found it to be a great conversation starter when I did this with my business domain. Of course, it’s mainly about spam control, but some people even felt flattered to have their own personal email address. Then there was that one time I tried to open a new bank account using bankname@mydomain - it ended up involving three levels of management. On the bright side, though, they now greet me by name whenever I walk into the building.

I think having a mail just seperately for bank can be good thing instead of having it on your own @mydomain I suppose?

Also can we have things like 2FA in banking apps? I am pretty sure...

Like my idea of thinking is to create a new proton account just for banking and doing the thing as in the article and not really ever linking the two of them or maybe even having a google account if proton causes any issue for my banks.

I had a small mom and pop shop threaten me with legal action because of copyright infringement...

I find from.bigcorp.2137@mydomain.com doesn't trigger any shadiness detectors.

I like that as well, but it's exhausting having to explain every time that, no, I don't in fact work at randoburgerspot...

What? It's your opportunity to nerd out and lecture people on why they're doing email WRONG!!!

(only half joking)

I usually just say "I receive all email @mydomain.com. I make one-off emails so I can tell who sells my email address." Most "normies" get it.

Easy, just remove the vowels from the local part of the address: rndbrgr@example.com

Even easier: I have a list of pre-generated fantasy addresses on my smartphone and can pass one to randoburgerspot on the fly.

> fantasy addresses

Highly unrecommended if it's important or you're a repeat customer. It is easiest to pick a consistent generation scheme that helps you to remember the email address you gave. Obviously record it somewhere too (a folder for the first you've-just-signed-up email is easy)

For throwaway accounts it doesn't matter what you give.

I’ve been surprised how infrequently I need to explain this — definitely fewer than 10 times in the last 20 years of doing some variation if this consistently.

I keep expecting to have to explain, but the vast majority of the time people don’t ask.

I got a LOT more confused looks, especially because I stupidly used a subdomain for this purpose. Imagine like, burgers@e.abc.co.uk when someone is expecting an @gmail.com.

If I could think of an unambiguous .com, .net, or .org that is a pronounceable word that wasn't registered already by 2001, I'd be maybe willing to try this again.

Same here. I have a .dev tld (Ooh ahh very fancy). My email is [first]@[last].dev . The amount of times they go "@ gmail?" Is astonishing. These are people who all day, countless times per day, for countless years, are collecting emails (front desk clerks, support reps, whatever), and not one email in the history of emails is the format blah@blah.blah@gmail.com, but somehow they think mine is. Should've just stuck with the Gmail

I've had firstname@lastname.me for a few years now and so far haven't had any confusion. They just read it back to me to make sure it's correct. I used to do the businesname@mydomain and that caused lots of confusion, especially when support ask me for my email and I can't remember what it was. And they are confused because my email has their name in it.

Mine is me@[fullname].[tld] and I still kind of regret it because no one expects such a short set of characters before the @ sign. Even many websites don't. It's never been rejected but rather it breaks basic personal details masking. Because they often mask an email address replacing all but the first and last characters of the username portion with asterisks and leaving the domain fully exposed...

Not to mention that I've been told by a couple people that they find it to be an awkward email address. Sending to "me" from their perspective should mean sending to themselves.

Hmmm I've had websites not accept mine but I'm still not sure why. Maybe it's the .dev . Cheapo regex

I wouldn't be surprised. They probably have like .com, .net, .org, .gov, .edu and maybe some ccTLDs hardcoded.

I only had once in over 20 years someone asking me to clarify that. Maybe because I add a short standard prefix before “randoburgerspot” (which also happens to serve as a wildcard filter).

I've been using my own domain for mail like that for over fifteen years now, and it happened only once that I've had to explain "no I don't work at $drugstore" when giving my "drugstore@mydomain.tld". And even that one time only got me like a weird look, but no further discussion. I enter my mail address into some form myself most of the time, after all.

Gmail has a limited version of this. It leaks your real address, but it makes filtering easy.

<yourname>+<arbitrary_str>@gmail.com

steve+randoburger@gmail.com

I've seen places that won't allow a "+" saying it's an invalid character.

ah! the fathers of slop vibe code: copy paste coders.

the "validate email input regex" that mistakenly rejects plus sign have been copy pasted for so long it might live on forever.

Could be by design. They want you using your main gmail address and not signing up multiple times.

you'd think if that was the only thing broken on that copy-pasted-regex.

Microsoft, for example, for a Windows login account does this.

I use PurelyMail to get email redirection with wildcard support. Costs $4/year when I use it with Gmail for the actual storage.

I use an underscore so my addresses look like evidlo_[placholder]@example.com

So they don't charge for emails if they are forwarded? Do you have a link where they describe underscore aliases?

I use their "Advanced" billing mode which is usage-based and ended up cheaper than the fixed-price "Simple" mode. This was my bill for last month (received ~300 emails):

    Total: $0.35
    Storage (GB/month): 0.00 ($0.00)
    Emails sent to non-Purelymail accounts: 19 ($0.00)
    Emails sent: 19 ($0.00)
    Emails sent (GB): 0.00 ($0.00)
    Yearly account fee (days): 30 ($0.33)
    Shared-domain user fees: $0.02

They don't actually support wildcards, but there's a matching pattern "Any address starting with" for which I just entered "evidlo".

https://purelymail.com/docs/routing

No need for a filter rule apparently!

https://purelymail.com/docs/features

"Subaddressing allows you to tag the email addresses you give out. […] This also works with example_tagged@purelymail.com (in fact, everything after the first symbol- anything not a letter- in an address is ignored for routing) […]"

It's a standard, but it also makes figuring out your canonical address easy, which is great for ad tracking via sharing the hash of the canonical address easy. (They say they never share your address, but they don't say anything about a hash of it using the algo agreed upon industry-wide...)

Migadu allowed me to use - instead, so firstname-*@ also ends up in my inbox (firstname@).

Spamgourmet lets you do this for free without your own domain, and has other great features also.

Lots of these services get their domains blocklisted eventually, sadly.

Companies tried to block Apple’s Hide My Email in the months after its release, but I haven’t been blocked in years now. I’m assuming they quickly realised that it was here the stay.

Fun fact: Apple blocks using Hide My Email with itself, which I found out once I tried to use it in my contact details when ordering a phone. Their online system reported unknown error when placing the order until I specified a Gmail address instead.

I found two providers in 20 years that blocked my xoxy.net spam gourmet address. It's not that big of a problem.

Been using spam gourmet for 20 years. Basically a flawless service.

I don't even have to bother with creating a 'real' alias address. When I make an account I can punch in any random address @mydomain and it shows up in my primary inbox in a special folder. It's so much more convenient

Could also be useful if someone puts a typo in your email username when sending you an important email. You'll still get the email with a catch-all emails set up on your own domain. But you won't without this.

But also annoying when your domain is very similar to another business and you keep getting their emails because of typos.

My email address at my hosted domain is like jsmith@jsmith.com, and I have a catchall so I can get mail for *@jsmith.com

Someone eventually bought jsmith.net for his business and now I get a lot of mail meant for jacob@jsmith.net sent to my jsmith.com domain.

Fortunately he uses just the one address and now I set up an autoforwarding rule to forward his jacob@ emails to him.

Even having a Gmail address doesn't make you immune from someone putting in the wrong address.

I made a throwaway/spam account with a silly name back in ~2007, and then in ~2015 someone established a fairly successful company with that name. I now regularly get job applications, tax documents, and employee timesheets to my email. They even signed up for the service that controls their website with my email.

I keep waiting for them to contact me about taking over the address, but as far as I can tell they don't even realize they don't control it.

This is the most useful thing about having your own domain for email.

Perhaps you missed it or the author updated the article, but I think this does cover it:

>Oh, and I highly recommend providers that offer a "catch-all" feature. This way, you can have one main email address and unlimited <put something here>@yourdomain.com email addresses. It's useful to have it separated, like netflix@yourdomain.com, but still receive the emails inside the same inbox.

What’s your solution when you don’t renew your domain and someone else buys it? Would that person have a single entry to every single account you own?

I've occasionally pondered some sort of phone app that that can dynamically create a random new forwarding email, and keep track of what purpose it was for and who you shared it with.

Firefox/Mozilla and Apple both offer services along these lines.

I was thinking of something that would work with a personal domain, with a mail server that I (indirectly) control.

It would maintain a small pool of immediately-available addresses, since there might be latency in setting up a new one. When I need it, one is removed from the pool, recorded with metadata (e.g. purpose, duration, who to blame if it gets spammed), and in the background the process is started to restock the pool.

I recommend simplelogin.io

Reply on news.ycombinator.com