2021: Techbro cold emails me about his startup using a unique email address generated on my website.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

Do not spam an ex-sysadmin who was responsible for email servers in the mid 2000s.

deutrino

@ryanc get his ass

Sick Sun

@deutrino @ryanc this happened to me from some shitbag whose tool I signed up for from hacker news. I use a unique email for every signup

deutrino

@sun do you use plus-addressing for uniqueness or do you have a better solution? @ryanc

Sick Sun

@deutrino @ryanc I run my own domain and it's a catchall so anything to my domain goes to the same box. so I do like:

[email protected]

and I give it to google

then if they abuse it I See it

Eliot Lash

@deutrino @sun @ryanc There is a free service for making burner self-destructing forwarding emails at https://www.spamgourmet.com that's been around for a long time. I use it sometimes but honestly Gmail spam filtering is so good nowadays I haven't bothered much unless it's something sketchy.

Eliot Lash

@deutrino @sun @ryanc Also I should mention this works like a + alias, you don't need to log in to their site more than once ever to use it. If I were to write an email address like [email protected] it will forward one email to me and then shut down. You can allow up to 20 emails this way, or log into their dashboard to add a sender to an allow-list so their emails won't increment the counter.

SpaceLifeForm

@ryanc

Did the opt-in requirement come into existence post 2021 ?

deutrino

@sun @ryanc kinda thinking I should get a domain solely for email and do exactly this, I don't have a catch-all currently so I use plus addressing which is not great

deutrino

@Eliot_L that's a pretty cool service, do they have a bunch of domains or just the one? @sun @ryanc

Eliot Lash

@deutrino @sun @ryanc I'm only aware of the one domain. It's an old service that's been operating continuously since the year 2000, I don't know if multiple domains were really trendy back then.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@SpaceLifeForm email service providers have required opt in for a long time

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@Eliot_L @deutrino @[email protected] I have a similar feature set to what spamgormet offers configured on my own mail server.

I also have support for + addressing in some cases, but I can implement whatever I want.

I do not in most cases use + addressing because the extension can be stripped/altered.

For most things, I use aliases that include a random value to prevent my email addresses from being guessed.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

@deutrino @[email protected] running an actual catch-all will trigger anti-fraud systems sometimes, and yes they can and will check.