[shoo_pl]

The problem is if someone figures it out and starts sending you spam to {random}@domain.tld. That's when you will need to sit down and start creating actual aliases for all those used email addresses and stop the catch-all forwarding:)

Also, another downside is that you will loose privacy by using your own domain.

And the lack of privacy makes targeted scam/phishing more likely, and targeted scam is the one we are most susceptible to.

All in all, I am not saying this is bad idea, in fact I am doing it myself, just pointing out this is not so black and white.

Using iCloud solves those problems, but puts you at risk of getting your account banned and loosing access to those emails, so there is that.

Probably best way to deal with it is to get dedicated email domain with a bunch of your friends, and hook it up with something like SimpleLogin. But that's gets complicated quickly ;)

[jonotime]

I have run this for years with very little problems. And I can honestly say that have not found anyone writing to addresses I did not give them at their domain. Simple as this is, it is way to niche for companies to figure it out and exploit it. And if that really was a problem I'd just create a new subdomain.

If you are worried about privacy, get a domain just for this. Use domain privacy and dont host other things there.

Yes, some sites whitelist domains or dont allow subdomains. For those I'll use another account - or a firefox alias or something. But 9 out of 10 work fine.

I am not a fan of alias services since materializing names takes discipline. How many do you make? Maybe there is a limit of 50. When do you share them across services? My guess is many people just create 2 or 3 aliases they use for everything - which defeats the purpose. Sure, it masks your personal address, but once one gets compromised, you find it basically served as your personal address anyway.

I also dont really keep track of most of the names I use. Since most are one time things that I would never use again, like to sign a waiver or something. But I mostly stick to '{domain}@' for the names. So my nytimes account would just be nytimes@, which is predictable when I need to recover it. I used to use addy.io for this, but it was not as good since it had account limits and I had to manually manage every alias. Much easier for me to just create a mail filter to sinkhole an old name. Of course I have never really needed to do this anyway.

[pseudalopex]

> I have run this for years with very little problems. And I can honestly say that have not found anyone writing to addresses I did not give them at their domain. Simple as this is, it is way to niche for companies to figure it out and exploit it.

Someone I knew did this. Spammers used lists of common names.

[lern_too_spel]

They'll do this to the sld, but if you only set up mail routing for a subdomain, you're fine in my experience.

[cube00]

I've found using a subdomain helps with that, spammers will try [e-mail] but won't bother trying to brute force subdomains.

However be warned some surprisingly large websites don't support subdomains, for example eBay will silently send [e-mail] to [e-mail] and you'll only figure it out by looking at your server logs for rejected mail.

In those cases I have to specifically alias that [e-mail] to the subdomain.

With this new Apple privacy subdomain maybe eBay will finally fix this.

[janc_]

Why would anyone entrust money to a company like eBay if they are this incompetent at something as simple as e-mail?

[int_19h]

Because the world runs on incompetence, so it's ultimately unavoidable (best case, you don't know that something important that you're relying on is run incompetently).

[drnick1]

> Also, another downside is that you will loose privacy by using your own domain.

Not really no. You can absolutely create a domain using bogus WHOIS information. No one will bat an eyelid.

[drdexebtjl]

WHOIS isn't a factor here. If an attacker knows or deduces that you're the only individual receiving mail at *@yourdomain.example [1], they can track you across different databases by just looking for your domain name.

The privacy preserving aspect of hide-my-email services is the fact that they have thousands of users using the same domain name.

[1]: This is trivial if you have a service's email database leak. You just find all domains that have exactly one user. If the service targets individuals (who would sign up with personal emails, not work emails) and is reasonably popular, you'll get a pretty good list of single-user domains.

[drnick1]

> If an attacker knows or deduces that you're the only individual receiving mail at *@yourdomain.example [1], they can track you across different databases by just looking for your domain name.

How would that attacker gain access to such databases? Let's say HN is compromised and my email here, say [e-mail], is leaked. How does that help you track me elsewhere? If I start receiving spam at [e-mail] because of the leak, I will simply revoke the alias and the spam will bounce.

[KomoD]

> How would that attacker gain access to such databases?

Data breaches happen all the time.

Some services also expose emails, intentionally or unintentionally. Github is one example where your email might be exposed publicly.

> How does that help you track me elsewhere? If I start receiving spam at [e-mail] because of the leak, I will simply revoke the alias, and the spam will bounce.

Because, as parent said, if someone deduces that you are the only user of mydomain.com, they can just search leaked or exposed records for @mydomain.com and infer that the accounts most likely belong to the same person.

That's the difference, with hide my email millions of unrelated people share the same domain, so you can't reliably link one email to another just based on the domain.

[driverdan]

> The problem is if someone figures it out and starts sending you spam to {random}@domain.tld.

It's a non-issue. I've been using a catch all domain for at least a decade. I get a small amount of spam to random made up emails but not enough to care about plus it all gets caught and filtered.

[themafia]

The mechanism I use is ordered. All specific aliases are tried first and then it falls through to the catch-all forwarding rule.

So, it's a piece of cake to add "{random}@example.com" to the block list. Usually it's something like "[e-mail]".