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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

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

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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 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.

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’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.

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.

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