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Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

> The coordinated takedown, codenamed Operation SIMCARTEL, took place on October 10 in Latvia, as part of a joint investigation by police in the Baltic nation, Austria, Estonia and Finland.

Not the best way to see my country in the news, but oh well.

That said, I wish I could reasonably do something similar to what's possible with e-mails: where you can have one mailbox per account/company you want to do interaction with, like aliexpress@mydomain.com, paypal@mydomain.com, banking@mydomain.com and so on. I'd like to have one phone number per company or whatever that I have to interact with, so that if they sell my data to third parties and I suddenly start getting advertisement/spam calls, I can figure out exactly who was acting badly.

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Honest question, how well does it go for for email ?

I did that pretty seriously for a while, and in my case I feel it led to nothing specific. I'd get spam from weird places and shut the address, but that would actually amount to an extremely small amount of the total spam I was getting.

Also my ISP or the phone company was selling away my email and there was no way I'd just block them, nor would they give a shit about my bitching to their customer support.

Yea, same feeling here. I did that for a while but in the end I maybe went ahead and blocked one address in over 10 years of doing that. It was more of a hassle than it was worth, especially if you want to do password resets and you have to dig up that email again vs. just typing your default one.

What hassle? With a bit of organization there's no real hassle. My addresses are all in /etc/aliases on the mail server and have a time stamped comment in front of them naming the company / website.

I can easily take this "db" with me on my smartphone. Or could make it available with a simple interface. As we use Joplin already to share data between family members, that's the place the list of addresses lives for lookups from family members.

The benefit isn't primarily for deletion, which is a nice side effect, but to easily recognize phishing to the "wrong" email addresses. Certain deletions are done automatically for addresses where I put a timestamp in, e.g. me.dhl24c@example.com will be from the third quarter of 2024 and can be removed at the end of 2024.

> What hassle?

You made my point better than I could with the rest of your post.

Enable catchall and you don't need to do all of that work.

It's not "much work" it's a script. That was a tiny bit of work but that's a long, long time ago :-)

As for "catch all" that makes addresses available which are otherwise not available and get rejected.

I personally like the idea that my bank account has a completely different email and password then any other account.

In theory, criminals don't know where to even try to exploit/phish.

Yes. BTW I still do that, but with a single address, username+myonlinebank@domain.com style. It was easier when I need to give them my email again on the phone or in other circumstances, they can see it's just the same with extra bits.

I tried this route at first. There are enough stupid forms that reject VERP addresses that it's easier to just use different recipients.

My issue is if username+ecommercewebsite@domain.com leaks my account login: username@domain.com as the + is a known feature. If they are able to access username@domain.com, then they would be able to access password recovery for my bank.

With a separate finance account, even if they figured out how to access my primary personal email. There is still an air gap with my financial accounts.

The advantage isn't necessarily about blocking addresses but them not being able to be correlated. Nowadays every product sends your email to ad providers (Facebook, etc), sometimes in hashed form. Using unique addresses per company defeats such tracking.

Similarly they also do it with the phone number, which is also why the techbros hate these SIM farms so much.

Spam is so easy to identify I don't bother. I can tell a message is spam from the subjectline + sender I would say almost 100% of the time. Those messages get deleted unread.

If you give your real email, almost every service starts spamming you - they think that annoying people is a "growth hack". Use temporary email whenever possible.

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