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Comment by _jcwu | Hacker News Reader

You should be using your own domain anyways.

I do this and make a new alias for everyone I give an address to (such as hn@domain.com). It can be interesting to see who leaks/sell your email address. You can also shut down alias that get out of control.

I do this too but sometimes companies reject my replies because the from address isn't the same address they have on record. Maybe there's a way to make the "reply's from" the same as the "original's to" but idk.

With FastMail, you can select your wildcard as your "from" address on their web app, and just directly edit the `*` to be `<whatever>` and it will work fine :)

FastMail lets you change the from: address on the fly if you’ve set up a catch all.

And if you are not with fadtmail, there’s are several “multiple identities” add-ons for thunderbird (and recently a built in one, though it is still buggy) which let you add from addresses on the fly.

Thanks for replies. Link for others: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html

Fastmail has an even nicer feature: subdomain addressing. If you are dave@mp.com, you can set up Fastmail to accept subdomains

dave@hn.mp.com

dave@lobsters.mp.com

Avoids catchalls ;).

Tyvm! That looks epic. Link: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/addressing.html Might be tricky if the time came to migrate away from FastMail though.

Indeed! This is why I stopped using it. I love Fastmail, but who knows if I feel that way in 5 years. The entire point of Fastmail + own domain is never being locked in again. Using subdomain addressing locks you in once again.

I'm with @rb666; Don't rely on it as most will support plus+ addressing but not the the fast mail subdomain addressing as I am now in the process of migrating to Migadu.com and I need to go and unsubscribe and resub using the plus+tag. It's a PITA... lesson learned, stick with best industry practices even if there is an easier method because you'll thank yourself later.

catchalls are great. In addition to allowing the use of arbitrary custom addresses on a whim they make it really easy to identify spam and train spam filters. Anything that arrives on multiple random/unused addresses at your domain is spam.

Is also nicer than plus-notation like dave+hn@mp.com, which from time to time gets rejected by some overly zealous (but wrong) adress checking tool.

Last time I tried this, I found a lot of corporate spam filters seemed to (silently) drop my emails, so I went back to using GMail out of frustration.

Is there anything you do that helps with this? I was using GApps and I don't think my domain name was too spammy (samlewis.me).

Huh, I haven't had that problem in about 7 years of using a custom domain name. Maybe the distinction is that mine is a .com? I feel like enough businesses themselves use custom domain names that dropping unknown .coms would break a ton of legitimate B2B traffic, but perhaps .me less so.

How did you notice this?

I use a .me domain myself but I haven't had any spam problems. Although I share it very very sparingly and have a catchall on another domain that I use for signing up with any service / sharing with non-trusted contacts. Even there, the spam problem isn't bothersome.

I haven't had any issues with my personal domain in years, ever since I moved it from random web host to GApps, to deal with IP reputation issues, and have SPF+DKIM setup. (but my domain is a .net one)

Did you manage to configure SPF correctly in your DNS records?

Make sure you setup SPF/DKIM/DMARC and you should be fine 99% of the time.

- Disclosure, I work for dmarcian

Which FastMail does if you have them host your DNS!

Fast mail will host your DNS? Had not seen that...

Don't use any of the "unsual" TLDs, like .io, .me, .toys, etc.

Surprisingly difficult for a personal-professional email if you have a somewhat common name. Nearly everything under the main TLDs was bought up ages ago. The issue can be mitigated with some creative branding work, but that’s arguably not any easier.

I've used .io and other "unusual" TLDs for a while and never had an email bounce or flagged as spam.

As someone else pointed out, make sure you setup spf, dkim, and all the other jazz. Some providers will host and setup the dns for you but its always best to use your own dns provider as the records are relatively easy to setup.

Agreed 100%. After losing multiple emails addresses in the past due to ISP changes, having an email on your own domain is nice. You can then even switch email providers as you wish and your address will follow.

You've never lost a domain name I see.

As long as you're paying for it, there's very little probability of that happening.

I got my personal domain (alexn.org) in approximately 2008, so that's older than most people's Gmail accounts ;-)

Well, my Gmail account dates to 2004 but my personal domain dates to December 2000! I've lost domains that I continued to pay for, in fact I'm pretty sure that Zoho was paying for their domains as well.

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