Hacker News Reader

Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

You can filter your gmail based on the TO field (so anything without the dot goes to spam) if you like. I've done the same thing myself intentionally: I give the dot-less version to sites/companies where I need to receive an email or two (account confirmation etc). Then I manually grab them from spam and then forget the whole thing knowing I'll never see the other crap they send me.

Hope that helps, as someone with a common name I sympathize enormously.

View on HN

You can also append “+whatever” to the username part of your gmail address and filter it that way.

E.g. johndoe+mailinglist@gmail.com

Unfortunately some services won’t accept that as a valid address.

Others strip it too

And most email scrapers / aggregators these days also ignore the + and whatever comes after.

I wrote about this issue on my blog. Basically just using email aliases on a custom domain to enable per-provider filtering, and deletion of the alias if they ignore unsubscribe requests or get hacked. https://jonpurdy.com/2020/06/using-email-aliasing-to-detect-...

I use this all the time, everywhere I can.

The worst example of "we know what are valid email addresses better than anyone" case was when adidas.com decided that they'd redesign their registration flow and in the process disabled logins with "invalid" email addresses when they previously had accepted registrations and logins with email addresses tagged with + for years. That was genius.

I've done this — I have a filter to move any email I receive without a dot into a "Not For Me" folder, which I periodically go through and usually send a canned response back about how they probably have the wrong person.

You can also automate this part, perhaps to reply with "You probably have the wrong person, but if it is actually for me I'll get back to you shortly".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com