Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chmars 3659 days ago
I am switching away from unique mail addresses … I used a mix of catch-all and plus characters:

The former reduces the efficiency of your spam filter, the later is not (fully) supported by many websites. AirBnB for example allowed me to set an mail address with a plus character, however, login did not work anymore, so I was locked out and had to create a new account … AirBnB support refused to change my mail address since they apparently did not get the plus character 'trick'.

1 comments

Add grep whitelist to your spam filter for some arbitrary extension, e.g. a tld such as '.com'.

This way the address can be some-web-app.somecompany.com@yourdomain.tld, you can whitelist *.com@ (or higher up on the subdomain if necessary).

Not sure if this would maintain the efficiency of your (or any) spam filter, but it does avoid the '+' character.

In my experience adding the domain of the recipient often leads to problems.

  Rep: "Can you verify your email address?"
  Me: "er, em-verizon@example.com"
  Rep: "Hey, I didn't know you worked for Verizon!"
  Me: "no..."
And now the call gets excruciatingly slow and unfriendly because the rep thinks I'm trying to hack something.

Also, more than one web forum has silently binned me until I removed the domain from my email address. Had one where I could post for a few days, then the admin deleted me and sent that email address a crazy anti-spam rant thinking I was a bot.

I still like using unique email addresses but I make sure they're obscure.

I use the domain backwards e.g. nozirev@mydomain.com.Customer service agents don't notice, and it's easy for me to tell where the email was supposed to have originated.