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Comment by cpach | Hacker News Reader

One could give away a unique e-mail address to every web site. Quite a hassle though.

I've been doing it for years without problem, it's a lot easier than you'd first think. Markov chain makes the leader of the email address, domain is selected from a random pool.

Are those your own domains?

For things I care about the domains are owned by me, for things I consider spammy I have a round robin of afraid.org aliases which are for all intents and purposes disposable. They are very effective for this sort of thing, but you would be wise to do your research into the history of the domain you're piggybacking to be sure it's not going to disappear.

if you use a gmail account, you can use a + after yourusername

So cpach@gmail.com and cpach+hackernews@gmail.com would both end up in the same inbox, then you can use gmail filters to separate them

This trick only works because it's not that popular. If a substantial amount of people started doing it, firms would simply start removing the extra +info that you pad to your address.

Good point. But I doubt any significant share of users will consider doing it. Most of them are of course unaware that it’s even possible.

Perhaps someone here has some statistics to share? It would be interesting to know how common this trick is :)

[Edit: Better wording]

This could potentially be solved by using alias emails instead of just adding a tag to your normal e-mail address. I can imagine gmail offering a quick "generate alias" button that creates a EkTG522f3fhgtfh@gmail.com address that instantly forwards to your real address. Obviously you can delete this alias if you find that you are being spammed.

Regrettably a significant number of back ends (principally Microsoft ones in my experience) regard the +bit as malformed and reject the email address.

Yep. But it can be circumvented if one’s mail server use another delimiter. E.g. ”.” will hardly be filtered.

Actually yes, I remember now that's why I use - in my Postfix instead.

Postfix allows you to choose any character as a separator.

You set up a catch-all on your domain, and just make up whatever@domain.tld whenever you need an address. I have all my domains set up that way. Not even for unique addresses, just for convenience.

I have exim set up to accept all mail to my domain that starts with a particular prefix. So I sign up to websites as myprefix-sitename@mydomain.com.

Setting it up was a bit of a fiddle because I suck at exim, but it's no ongoing hassle.

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