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Comment by jetbalsa | Hacker News Reader

It got so bad on my main emails, I just made a new one, started out with a custom domain and going to start doing per-website emails from now on to track where the hell its coming from

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> going to start doing per-website emails from now on to track where the hell its coming from

Beware that some websites use this "legitimately":

I ordered some stuff from Ikea and asked that it get delivered. Ikea forwarded the request to a third party, TaskRabbit. I now get TaskRabbit email spam to my ikea.com@ per-website email. And no matter how many times I unsubscribe from TaskRabbit the spam still comes.

Spam detection successful! I just put @taskrabbit.com into the blackhole and call it a day. If I get more spam to ikea.com@ then it will also get blackholed. I already won't buy anything else from Ikea for something as dumb as this.

The first time I busted a company doing this was very satisfying writing to their privacy officer requesting they remove every trace of my data from their systems with an attachment of the spam email with their domain on it so it there could no doubt where it leaked from. Hopefully it was worth the few cents they got selling my address.

You were satisfied with with empty calories? That's what I would consider this with the information you provided. Did the company you sent this removal request a) respond, b) honor your request? If no, then what you did was essentially waste your time. If they did, why not add that information to your post?

Such a shortsighted view of the action taken!

A) if more people make a fuss about their email getting sold the way OP did, we can still salvage something out of the situation

B) results/outcomes are not the only reason people why should do things. After all, we lionize those Russians protesting the Ukraine invasion knowing nothing will come out of it at a personal level.

I can see where you're coming from, but I disagree with shortsighted. Pessimistic maybe. I see this kind of messaging to a company doing shady things similar to clicking the unsubscribe link in emails. It's just confirming the message was read by a human, and validates the email address as a good target. Even if you send the cease email from a different address, you've just given them a new address to harvest.

This is bad IMO, why should individuals have to rectify something a company did? All it does is encourage bad behavior because I'm sure that the still comes out ahead if even 10% (being generous) did the above.

Society would be way better if we made a collective action to lobby our Congress to change the laws and make it illegal. Tech has been unregulated for far too long and there's too many bad actors taking advantage of this.

"Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $46,517, so non-compliance can be costly." I'm not sure how much of that can be collected by the recipient.

In what alternate reality has this been a thing putting SPAMers out of biz?

I did this after discovering it was Comcast and had them try to play dumb till this day and say that someone "guessed" the randomly generated email.

yeah they did that as well with my <name>_comcast@<mydomain>.com and say the same. Every email I have is registered like that (rule in postfif for a non + separator because spammers remove them) and I see leaks all the time. Last one was robinhood address for which I now receive some crypto scam on it.

Any good email services that offer unlimited aliases on custom domains at a reasonable price, or are you running that yourself?

You can use a catchall, no need to set an alias for each address. Fastmail is very often recommended around here

Does that not get you a bunch of extra spam that's been blasted at made up addresses?

I have my custom server for that. Yes it happens, the occasional mail on root@ etc but that's negligible compared to normal level of spam.

Fastmail.com

(No affiliation beyond being a happy customer.)

Migadu mail is very cheap, been using them for almost a year now with zero interruption or issues. Unlimited custom domains, unlimited aliases, etc for $20/yr

I had just started using this one, enjoying it so far!

If you are in the Apple ecosystem, you can do custom domains for $1 / month using iCloud+.

Does this include catch-all / unlimited aliases?

If you are all-in on the Apple ecosystem you can get unlimited aliases with Apple's "Hide My Email" system.

https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email/

$15/year (plus the cost of the domain)

Currently using the middle tier and have been very happy with it.

Note that codified aliases are limited, but you can create a catch-all account. I have not needed to codify aliases to send "as" one of those accounts.

I've only used it once or twice, but Fastmail has something like this as part of their lowest paid tier.

https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

Actually have to step up to $5/month (per user) to get custom domain names.

you can just add +myalias to most email services and get it delivered automatically. E.g. first.second+github@gmail.com delivers to firstsecond@gmail.com

But this is a quite well-known technique, so if someone is at least a little smart along the way, they can easily strip the +github part.

Not just "can," they do strip the + part. Especially the sketchy ones. Or they barf. I tried this for a while and had a 30% success rate. It was dismal.

spammers strip the + and some websites refuse them. I switched to other symbols on my own server to go around that.

PretzelBox.cc (my project) does this along with a blog, a file storage area, and hosting.

Final pricing is still TBD but if you join the beta list, we are handing out huge discounts which’ll bring your effective cost between $5-15/month for everything.

I’ve been doing this for a few years and find that the per website emails aren’t so bad and it’s whenever I use my old “legacy” emails that I’ve had with gmail for ages that gets the spam directed to it.

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