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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person that thinks it’s weird that we encourage using unique passwords everywhere, but the second piece of information needed to login (username, email etc) we tend to keep the same for everything?

I posted a Show HN last night for a side project I’ve built that can solve the email part of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19296936

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I did a cheap version of this where I didn't have to build anything but I could test out the concept because I thought it would be awesome and I thought I wanted it.

Long story short it became problematic pretty quickly and I ditched it. You need to also be able to reply as that email address too etc. It's been done a bunch a times I understand.

And, sadly, the more users use it the more chance that the big players start to ban such addresses.

It actually happened with the anti-spam services I‘ve used, twice.

For my custom domain I set up a catch-all so *@sharparam.com gets routed to my main address. If I end up needing to reply from such an address I set up a proper alias for it (currently I use GSuite to manage it).

Another alternative if you don’t have your own domain is to put a plus in the email address. The mail server will ignore anything after that plus, eg johnsmith+facebooklogin@gmail.com will have all email sent to johnsmith@gmail.com, but it will preserve the To header in the email.

This is useful for detecting the origin of spam, however it’s trivial for a spammer or hacker to workaround (just strip the plus and anything after it before sending)

> It's been done a bunch a times I understand.

Got any links to these services?

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