[HocusLocus]

Boss move that I learned under great difficulty: a new temporary gmail alias for every jobsearch.

[raddan]

You can take this to an extreme (like I do) and use a different email address for every party with whom you communicate. It makes it rather obvious who leaked your email address, and also easy to shut them out (looking at you ActBlue!). It also leads to some amusing personal interactions. I once rebooked a cancelled flight on JetBlue at the ticket counter. When the agent saw my email she said “wow, you must really like JetBlue.” I just nodded but I was laughing inside because it’s definitely the opposite!

[Dusseldorf]

I do this as well, and occasionally people get confused and think I work for the company I'm interacting with ([e-mail] is close enough to [e-mail], I guess.) I usually don't bother to correct them, in case it gets me better treatment :)

[fragmede]

The problem is that's guessable. I add a nonce/salt/bit of random chars; [e-mail] to compensate.

[Terretta]

This is how iCloud's "Hide My Email" (suggested to you by Safari at online account creation or filling out any email field basically) works. And then it remembers those random chars for that domain. Also ensures the email delivers to you.

[throwaway808081]

You're dealing with a different type of actor if that's necessary.

[fragmede]

the problem is you don't know which actor you're going to be dealing with so you have to start off on that foot with everybody.

[godelski]

I do this too, though sometimes it leads to confusion.

FWIW, Firefox's Relay integrates into Bitwarden so you can generate emails on the fly when creating new accounts. Downside and upside is that I never know what my email address or password is.

The huge benefit is I can write down an email that'll work because I own @somedomain.mozmail.com and it'll always redirect. I do the same thing with cloudflare because I also own myrealname.com

But honestly I hate all this because the real problem is that email is a bottleneck and it is stickier than phone numbers. But my email is floating around on a bunch of lists because I've had it for years. Frankly, gmail is pretty bad about removing spam. There's a lot of spam I catch using simple filters from Thunderbird.

The extra benefit is that I'm planning on moving away from gmail and all these relays make it easier to redirect everything to a new location. So I still recommend it. You can shutdown addresses that are being abused or shared more easily but that's hard to do with your long term email address.

[Terretta]

Aka iCloud "Hide My Email"

[schrodinger]

As a hiring manager, I just want to give you a heads up that we are getting tons of fake applicants—like 5–10%—that end up being a real person on a video chat isn’t some AI assistant that uses a teleprompter interface to tell them what to say.

Usually by that point you catch them, but your recruiter screen might not etc. So now all the main HR tools are using “age of email” as one possible signal to detect fraud.

I’m sure you’re fine if your email is real (in my experience they all resolve to Onvoy LLC instead of a real cell provider), but just something to watch out for. Wouldn’t want to get overlooked because your email is brand new.

(If you’re curious about motive as I was, since of course it’ll be obvious when you start—in a lot of cases it’s that procuring an offer letter helps you obtain a visa.)

[baobun]

How would you determine or estimate "age of email"? It isn't really public info. Does it imply that you are by now expected to be doxxed by data brokers to not be judged suspicious?

> I’m sure you’re fine if your email is real (in my experience they all resolve to Onvoy LLC instead of a real cell provider),

Email is expected to be resolving to "a real cell provider"? Wut?

[dilyevsky]

> How would you determine or estimate "age of email"? It isn't really public info. Does it imply that you are by now expected to be doxxed by data brokers to not be judged suspicious?

There are services that let you do that. Imperfect ofc as they rely on data brokers like you said. You can thank all the spammers and carders for that

[schrodinger]

Edit: “I’m sure you’re fine if your email is real” should be “…phone number”

(It’s too late to amend my comment)

[phyzome]

What does it mean for an email address to "resolve" to a cell company?

[sans_souse]

Stay tuned I have a pretty cool project I plan on launching very soon. It takes the email alias to the next level, using them as meta tags to actually allow users to trace the source of shady data exchanges. I'm working on the guide and I'm hoping to actually start a community effort here to hold companies accountable for responsible use of PII

[iamben]

I'm interested. How does it differ from using:

[e-mail] or [e-mail]

...to figure out where the spam originated?

[buu700]

> [e-mail]

Just be aware that this may be very confusing to customer support agents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32475178

[rsync]

FWIW, I have been using the [e-mail] auto-alias for many years now and I've never had it challenged nor rejected by a human or a machine.

[chrismorgan]

I’ve also been doing it for quite a few years, and I think I had it rejected by a machine once, and I had it questioned by a human once.

I’ve had way more problems from systems that think TLDs are two or three characters (which has never been true).

[loloquwowndueo]

Everybody knows name+something@ maps to name@ so it’s trivial for bad actors to strip the plus part and just spam you directly, losing the per-correspondent distinction.

[homebrewer]

Which is covered by GP's second suggestion. I add short random password-like strings to these aliases to thwart spammers who might be trying obvious aliases, turning e.g [e-mail] into [e-mail]

[loloquwowndueo]

I probably didn’t explain myself well.

On Gmail [e-mail] is an “alias” for [e-mail]. So if you give someone [e-mail] hoping that will help you map random string to that particular sender, you’re fucked - because anyone who sees [e-mail] knows it’s an alias for [e-mail], they can just email that directly and bypass your cleverness.

If you’re using a sane alias provider like you described, then it’s likely not an issue.

[sans_souse]

In the latter specifically it doesn't differ except for the specific methodology and what we do with the results.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Hm interesting, do you want to tell why this helps out a lot perhaps?

[HocusLocus]

;) I was a by-invitation-beta in 2004, trust me. Even then spammers knew about the +1234 trick too. The earliest throwaway forwarders suffered from explosive growth and spam netblocks and their queue times varied greatly. The golden age of Viagra and recruiters selling prospect lists to randos. I retreated to gmail for the SPOP and because my original address was Tech Contact for 100+ domains from 1994-2000. Thousands a week. If I was smart I'd have used it as a honeypot to feed a spam blocking service.

[makeitdouble]

Don't you get these spam mails either way ?

I have a separate email I only use to get government and public services (gas, electricity) stuff and it still receives a few hundreds of spam a week. At this point I kinda feel whitelisting the mail I want to read is the only sane option, so getting hundreds or thousands of spam mail makes little difference, while managing a portofolio of addresses is a chore.

[vunderba]

It might be an iCloud+ feature only, but if you're on a Mac - you've already got the ability to generate virtual email addresses on the fly.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078

[wafflebot]

I love this feature and wish something like it would come to Gmail.

I can't rely on iCloud Mail anymore due to its overly aggressive silent spam filtering. Not great if you're trying to log into an account, and you can't receive the recovery emails for that account.

[anonymars]

That's funny, as it's the same reason I moved off Gmail. Most egregious was a reply to my message ending up in spam, and the other party was someone also on Gmail

[gcanyon]

That's where the in:anywhere search is your friend. It searches all mail.

[anonymars]

What I mean is, the mandatory spam filter was so braindead it sent a reply to my own message to spam, which is itself absurd, but even moreso because the other party was also using Gmail

[raw_anon_1111]

You don’t have to use an iCloud account as a target for your real email address or even for your Apple account.

[pram]

iCloud Hide My Email is pretty good for this.

[joshribakoff]

I switched to fastmail, it imported all my gmail mail quickly, and it gives me virtual emails.

[njuhhktlrl]

[e-mail] will certainly end well.