[picofarad]

What's the most common thing you hear when you do this? Usually its nothing, but the second most common thing is: "no, sir, your email address."

It gives me the fuzzies every time to explain I own the domain, and every email address on it is mine.

Since I have it on my phone, I can usually receive the email that they send very quickly and prove that everything's working fine.

I am wondering how hard it is to do this again today with a new domain though.

[greengreengrass]

The best one was when someone said they were going to give me excellent service because “you work for corporate”, confusing the company name before vs. after the @ sign. I forget which company it was now but the agent was convinced I must be someone important.

I was torn between explaining and letting them believe it :-)

Most of the time, folks just don’t understand why their company name is in the address and they think it’s a mistake.

To be honest, I do tend to avoid this for anything other than throwaways because it causes too much confusion when I have to phone up, and I’m not really doing it out of a misguided belief it helps with spam (at least, it doesn’t help any more than security by obscurity is unsuitable as a singular defence, but maybe has a tiny role when layered into a broader strategy…)

[FLHerne]

I find it's convenient for knowing which companies have immediately - and illegally, in this country - sold my details on to third-party spammers. Makes it easy not to do business with them.

[genewitch]

maybe i can write a whatthreewords style "email identity mapper" so you put in "walmart.com" and it spits out "[e-mail]" and "autozone rewards" yields "[e-mail]"

then if you start getting spammed, you use the w3w style thing to reverse it and see what site/entity sold your email...

then all of the "this doesn't/won't work because they'll just spam the entire domain" arguments go away, the "no, your email address" style comments go away...

[greengreengrass]

Good thought experiment! Makes it hard to remember the correct address for each site, but meh, that's the job of my password manager anyway.

[genewitch]

one wouldn't have to remember. if the address you gave out using the w3w-style encoder starts getting spammed, you can reverse it with the w3w-style decoder.

you'd need an app or a mnemonic device of some sort if you wanted to give an email out in public as opposed to sitting at a computer. but ideally on the computer when you notice spam you just reverse the email address back to who you gave it to; "target.com", "kroger.com"