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Comment by buzzert | Hacker News Reader

I registered a domain name that’s basically just a UUID, and pointed it’s MX records to my self-hosted email server (you could also point it to Google Apps or Fastmail).

Everything before the UUID domain is just the name of the service, so something like hackernews@e913ff00...xyz. If someone sells out my email address, I can instantly burn it by just adding a sieve rule since they’re all unique. I even know who sold it based on what name I picked before the @ symbol. This has been working out pretty well for me so far.

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I'm using a similar technique, but rather generating a random address @my-domain.

To know which provider it was (in case I later get spam from somewhere else), I keep a text-file + email myself any time a new forwarder is set up, so this way I can always look up which service it was.

This way, I was able to spot a leak at box.com and maybe a couple of other places, before it was even announced.

Looks like a nice idea, since I’ve pondered about getting a name that’s not really meaningful or connected to my identities.

1. What’s the length of the UUID that you use?

2. Haven’t you encountered forms that have shorter email address length limits?

3. Also, wouldn’t such a domain be seen as a spammer/scammer when machine learning starts taking over signup/registration systems?

1. It is 21 characters long

2. Nope! I would be surprised to see that nowadays.

3. For sending mail, yes absolutely. Receiving mail is a different story though, it seems like most systems do not care.

I heard that some services have started rejecting email addresses that contain their name.

How hard would it be to set up a SQLite database or use a simple cipher?

For websites that have questionable password policy, I use passwords that curse the company in my native language (if no-one sees it then it's fine, but if someone does then they have deserved it). I bet the same tactic would work if you get creative, ie spotfuckingify@uuid

Oh no, I can't have google@mydomain, guess I have to have goog@mydomain or ggle@mydomain or meggl@mydomain

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