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Comment by bostik | Hacker News Reader

> LinkedIn is the primary reason I'm cautious to link my different services to something external

I've gone further. I routinely create email aliases for any new services I may need to use. (Yes, I have one dedicated to HN too.) That gives me quite a few nice features:

1) My email addresses are not generally cross-service

2) It's somewhat harder to consolidate my data even when the addresses are "leaked" (read: sold) from one service to another

3) I see with absolute clarity which service my email address was siphoned from.

4) I can trivially delete the address. It's just a line in /etc/aliases.

For #3, I haven't done any accurate measurements but it seems that an address finds its way to spammer lists about as often through the service selling it as it does from a user of that service inadvertantly placing it on one.

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GMail has a little trick that you can postfix anything to your email address username separated with a "+". For example my.name+linkedin@gmail.com.

Later this +postfix makes it easier to find out which source is the leak.

Most of the websites let you sign up with "+" in your e-mail but unfortunately not every site.

The other trick is that GMail ignores "." in email user so my.name can be just as well "myname". Not that it helps with the spam, just a sidenote.

Yep, the '+' as a separator is one of the many Postfix features.

However, the problem with using the "account+identifier" is that the identifier is simply ignored when delivering mail. With a real alias I can actually revoke an email address, by simply removing it from the aliases. With an identifier I would have to explicitly reject mails for a given recipient part.

I prefer to keep things simple. Bouncing spam is a bonus.

Check out gam [0]

    gam create alias idontwearseatbelts user crashtestdummy

The only problem with aliases is that it completely breaks using email as a unique id to link you with people. You basically fix spam but lose the "people you may know" feature on social sites where you actually care about knowing who you may know on it (i.e. not linkedin).

[0] https://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/wiki/GettingSt...

Explicitly reject / add a 'move to spam folder' filter, but yeah. And some places I've given +names have sent to my un-suffixed address (I mostly suspect bad email sanitizing / filtering due to Hanlon's Razor, but ya never know).

Problem is that it's trivial for these services to collapse the emails into a single one for merging purposes. I doubt many do though..

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