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Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

Issues with Quora aside, I think it's actually coming from people inside the bubble of startups/design/ux who want to complain without actually testing things.

I often show my wife sites/apps that might interest her. I've never heard her complain about creating an account (either with email/pw or facebook). If they drip-spam her, she'll unsubscribe. She's not a designer or hacker–just a normal 30-something, slightly-entrepreneurial, facebook-gmail-mac-using wife-mom.

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Here is my trick for this: I use an individual email address for each signup I do, in the form of <signupdomain.com>@mydomain.com. By that way, when I get spam, I don't only know the spams source, but I can block it with only one click by blacklisting the specific receiver email address.

I don't trust websites to not spam me and I don't trust them to not share my email with other spammers. I would never give my email to some unknown character. It's not an unreasonable position.

I have many email addresses. Some I use exclusively for things like signups, messages to which are diverted to particular folder on my mail client. I only ever dip into that folder to click activation links and password resets. Getting spam to those addresses has zero negative impact on me. I would have imagined this behavior is quite common.

I suspect it's not as common as you think. I have many email addresses, and a couple of my friends (who work in tech) do, but the vast majority of the people I know only have one (or two, if they have one leftover from school, etc.).

I've long since given up on that. I plaster my email address al over the internet, so that people can contact me. It means I get spam of course, but that's what spam filters were invented to deal with. Very little actual spam ends up in my inbox.

If you need to keep your email address secret, I suggest that you're doing the internet wrong.

Yes, everyone who disagrees with you is doing the internet wrong. FFS

Your N=1 study does not provide statistically useful results.

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