Hacker News Reader

Comment by monsterix | Hacker News Reader

I recently deleted my Linkedin account. But their junk emails continue to dirty my email even now. Next in the line is Skype, and then probably Facebook.

Thankfully, I never shared my genuine data with Facebook or opened an a/c on Instagram or Whatsapp ever so I'm good at a certain level when it comes to Facebook.

In my opinion Twitter is the only option that is sane at the moment.

View on HN

I've never even had a Linkedin account and they dirty my email with requests and reminders.

I tried many times to uncheck all the checkboxes to convince LinkedIn not to send me email, but they ignore them or create new ones, so now I just mark them as spam.

I briefly enabled Google+ for one of my accounts. It has been disabled since at least 6+ months.

My colleagues are still getting emails that seem to be coming from me about sharing stuff on Google+.

username+whatever@gmail.com is delivered to username@gmail.com, so if you add the service name when you sign up it's very easy to block unwanted traffic. It also tells you which service sold your email to spammers.

Also, if you run your own sendmail you can just add the following completely readable snippet to your sendmail.mc:

  LOCAL_CONFIG
  Kplus regex -d+ -s1,2 ^([^._]+)[._](.+)$
  LOCAL_RULE_3
  R$* <@ $=w > $* $: $(plus $1 $) <@$2> $3

That allows you to use "username.whatever@example.com" or "username_whatever@example.com" as well as the "+".

A lot of web sites' idiot email validator regexes won't allow "+" in emails. But every single one allows "." and "_".

Unless the spammers simply run remove the extra part from the address. A better way is to get your own domain and use a different alias for each service.

I've been doing the + thing for more than 10 years now. My observation is that spammers simply don't remove it (it's just not worth their time).

More importantly, legit services that are on the spammy side (or have broken unsubscribe links) will absolutely never remove it.

Back a few years when Ameritrade had a bunch of its user's emails sold to spammers, I just changed my email on the ameritrade website and started blocking my +ameritrade address. It worked like a charm.

I use a subdomain and forward *@subdomain.domain.com -- if you put a catchall on the root you will get spam.

Funny you say that, I've been constantly getting spammy emails from Twitter.

In all fairness to them though, they've been much better about that recently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com