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Comment by cleaver | Hacker News Reader

The key motivation is not security, but if any account starts receiving spam, I will have a good idea where it is coming from. It also lets me shut off mail from any source.

Some services will use that as the username, others allow me to pick my own. Using a password manager helps this whole scheme. Now that I do that, I could go to random email addresses and usernames.

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The only problem I've found with this method is the spammers that try to guess your email, so they end up sending emails to "admin@domain.com", "webmaster@domain.com", etc. The catch-all forwards them all to me.

The only way around this, I think, is to only have uncommon emails, like instead of admin@domain.com, use contactadmin@domain.com. Put a block on the common ones and you're good to go.

It's not that spammers try to guess your email, but that if you accept any email address as valid they'll notice that you are accepting delivery.

Once i figured this out i just created wildcard aliases that end with a static prefix: netflix-blah@example.com, adobe-blah@example.com, etc. This cuts down on 99% of the random spam.

regrettably this is against RFC 2142[1], which states that you need to leave certain mailboxes open (such as abuse@domain, webmaster@domain etc)

[1] - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt

Quite ironic, isn't it, how "abuse@example.com" is a conduit for abuse?

Spammers effectively killed that RFC.

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