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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

> Basically you should pre-authorize the senders

This is kinda what 'masked email' services like Fastmail's – of which I am a delighted customer – do.

Until you've known the comfort of creating an address; giving it to a service; deciding that you want to end your relationship with them; just deleting that address, without changing your mailbox or infrastructure or archives or anything else … it's kinda life changing. I recommend everyone try it.

Also, the chances of a phisher trying to get my BigBank details by sending mail to lonely.chicken6382@spuriously-named-and-unused-other-than-for-email-domain.com are … well, it seems unlikely.

I've never felt more secure. For real.

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I like per recipient emails, but I worried how I would know I authorized that sender to send to lonely chicken. The original site could have been compromised.

That's why I bought my email domain and use <domain_name>@hnrobert42.com. It helps to use a password manager.

I get a lot of convincing emails to linkedin@hnrobert42.com. As well as zynga, wework, etc.

I do something similar with prepend.com and find it helpful for sorting. Also fun to see which domains sell my email and which dont (blacksocks.com hasn’t show up from anyone else in 20 years).

> That's why I bought my email domain and use <domain_name>@hnrobert42.com. It helps to use a password manager.

Whenever there’s this discussion on HN, someone usually points out that can sometimes be a bother, especially when giving out the email in person, because people don’t really understand how email addresses works and ask “how did you get that email” or think you’re impersonating the service, or something similar.

I guess a solution might be to add the details sneakily. E.g. instead of linkedin@hnrobert42.com, saying robert_lkdn@hnrobert42.com

And some sites seem to have it not work. I suspect there’s lazy programmers with hardcoded test cases.

But that’s like 1:100 or so. And usually I’m entering my address to a robot so it’s not an issue.

I've done alice@myname.com, bob@myname.com, etc. I don't keep track of them carefully so I may pick the same name for two different sites.

It also makes it easier to pass off a fake realname! Hi I'm John Smith, jsmith@oneofmydomains-nottooobvious.com...

You can even pick a domain sound like a legitimate mail service or company, e.g. jsmith@jgs-consulting.com.or jsmith@liberty-mail.io

All domains and addresses in this comment are fictitious - overlap with real domains is coincidental.

The weird looks when I tell a shop my e-mail is "name plus sign shopname AT mydomain dot com"

I use +, so username+domainname@email-vendor.com

Which is in the RFC, but yet the sheer amount of times I sign up for something. Like a bank, or a financial firm, get the confirmation e-mail, and then click "Verify your address"

And get HTTP500 as their SQL has kicked up a stink

(The RFC also allows for (recursive (comments, so there's probably a middle ground between insanely overengineered specifications and a )))regex( someone found on a PHP forum somewhere (and yes this post is a valid email address (assuming there is a local regex account (or alias)))

Apple’s Hide My Email does the same thing and it’s just phenomenal.

Apple is a problematic email service provider. They don't even send DMARC reports.

Irrelevant to the subject of the Hide My Email feature.

Damn it - ublock origin did not block this promo.

The amount of bots promoting Fastmail here is insane. What the actual ...

Is it detecting bots? Or just matching ‘fastmail’?

A bot I am not.

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