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Comment by flanbiscuit | Hacker News Reader

how do you keep track of all the emails?

and did you always do this or did you start at one point having to go back through a lot of old accounts to change emails and passwords?

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I have a catch-all setup at my domain that forwards to my main account. I can then setup a filter to disable an address if it starts getting spammed or is compromised.

If you use gmail, you can use youremail+anything@gmail.com, and it will all get forwarded to youremail@gmail.com. This is incredibly handy for noticing who is sending you spam.

I'll also use it for sites that I know are going to send me spam, and then immediately create a filter than deletes emails sent to joe+annoyingsite@gmail.com (note: that's not my real email)

That does nothing to increase the security of your accounts, since effectively the email address is the same.

It keeps phishing attacks from being able to cross services (since if you get a citibank email to your coinbase email that would be a big flag) and it reduces the attack surface on other sites.

I use email.site@domain.com for this purpose and it makes it handy to see who has somehow lost/disclosed my email to third parties and not informed me (FreshDirect for example)

email.site@domain.com is at least a distinct email address, unlike using +. Especially if you use different passwords for each account, it means if one of the emails is compromised then the attacker can't use it to recover passwords of your other sites.

+ can be a distinct email address, just as . can be an alias. It really depends on how your email server is configured. Postfix makes it really easy to adjust what character you use.

> It keeps phishing attacks from being able to cross services (since if you get a citibank email to your coinbase email that would be a big flag) and it reduces the attack surface on other sites.

Or, more importantly, it lets you authenticate the sender in some way. Citibank has to send you email to you.citibankiscool1253stuffonlyIknow@example.net and it is unlikely for a spammer to guess that exact wording (without also trying hundreds of others, which would give it away by filling your inbox).

Does this actually prevent true spammers, or only emails you consider spam, but the sender thinks is worthwhile?

Otherwise, as a 'true' spammer, why wouldn't you just always strip off everything after the plus when adding the email to your distribution list?

I use _, not "+" and anybody else might use "." or "-" depending on the configuration of their mail server. Sure, you can always add the full email and every possible stripped email to your lists, but in practice, few people seem to do that (judging by the amount of spam I get to me_randomstuff@example.net as compared to me@example.net).

I use "-" with an alias to "_". It turns out that when you give an email address to random people, they sometimes don't know the difference between "dash" or "hyphen" and an underscore.

Depends on how smart the spammer is, and how much they care. Most spammers a) are not very bright, and b) are in a volume business. Even the ones smart enough to do this may not think it worth the time to possibly improve a tiny percentage of harvested addresses. Especially since those of us who are dedicated enough to maintain tagged addresses are unlikely to respond positively to spam no matter what address we receive it on.

That won't help here, your real Gmail address is exposed which lets everyone know that you have BTC on web wallets.

Actually it would help you here. In this case your real address isn't exposed unless someone guessed the exact version you used to sign up.

What do you mean? If joeblow+coinbase@gmail.com is in the leaked list you know that that joeblow@gmail.com is the "real" user and also is someone who has BTC.

There was no leak. The API allowed you to see whether a given email had an account associated, so someone churned through a big list of known email addresses to find accounts.

If you do a filter like this: All mail that arrives to john.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com is important. Everything else is spam. Of course you might not get emails from people who sends emails to john.smith@gmail.com nor johnsmith@gmail.com because the emails go to spam.

I'm kind of surprised that this still works. I would guess that diligent spammers will soon catch on and start stripping anything that comes after the + sign.

In general spammers deal with those things pretty quickly. They can just quickly add a regex to remove everything starting with the "+" and then you don't have any unique identifier any more.

I've found that when signing up for things, a lot sites don't allow the "+" in the email. They'll throw a email validation error. But at one point this was a good technique, I just think many sites have either don't allow it or can easily get around it

You can always use a service such as spamgourmet to "protect" your main email and be able to disable email addresses at any time. All the emails you get from the disposable email addresses just go to your main email address. Also the email address each email goes through is repeated in the subject line, so it's easy to keep track of things. (you can also get a list of all your disposable email addresses from their website)

I track all the emails with 1password (same as for the passwords).

I started doing this four years ago but before that I had an email address that I reserved only for signing up for most websites (to prevent spam leaking into my personal email address).

My mail is hosted on servers running Postfix that I control, so this won't work for everybody.

In main.cf:

  virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/db/virtual_aliases

This file is in the same standard aliases(5) file format:

  zzz-foo@example.com          my@real-account.com

I started doing this when I moved all of my mail off of Google. It has the advantage (over you+foo@gmail.com) that it doesn't reveal my real mailbox. It does very quickly reveal who shares/sells my e-mail address, though. When that happens, it's simply a matter of deleting the alias from the file.

If you’re using Gmail you can use address aliases, like me+site@domain.com. Unfortunately some websites will not validate that type of email address.

I've used sneakemail for a number of years. With their paid account ($12/yr, I think), it lets you create emails on the fly with a specific pattern.

For example:

amazon-flanbiscuit@sneakemail.com

That gets forwarded to your actual email address, and you can see how it was tagged. If needed, you can whitelist/blacklist specific senders from specific tags as well.

Never heard of them before. Do they have any benefit over Spam Gourmet? (which I use occasionally, and is free)

I've never heard of Spam Gourmet. I've been using Sneakemail for the past 10-15 years. Since it's so cheap, and it's worked well enough, I just haven't bothered looking at anything else.

With any standards compliant email server you can use "+whatever" in the username and the email should get to you: username+whatever@example.com.

I believe that totally depends on the mail server. If there is an actual standard for that, please do point me to it.

"+" is valid in the left-hand side portion and Postfix uses it (by default) as the separator to provide this feature but other mail systems (Qmail and, IIRC, Courier) use "-".

That functionality is not an RFC requirement, however.

Microsoft email ( outlook.com ) offers email aliases which are pretty good for this purpose .

keepass

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