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Ask HN: How do you use email aliases?

3 pointsBlip-A4y ago5 comments

For those of you that use a custom domain name for your email address, how (if at all) do you make use of email aliases?

I've seen many people recommend to use a unique alias for each account (e.g. github@myname.com, reddit@myname.com, etc.) in order to mitigate spam, but I'm wondering if this is more trouble than it's worth. Are there any unexpected consequences of doing this? I would like to keep things as simple as possible.

I'm considering just having one alias for personal/professional correspondence, one alias for "trusted" accounts (i.e. services that I don't think are likely to sell/leak my email address to spammers), and one alias for less trusted accounts.

What do you guys use/recommend?

5 comments

5 comments · 4 top-level

pwg4y ago· 1 in thread

I do use additional addresses the reasons are:

1) if company X becomes "spammy" (as in starts sending me too many advertisements, even though they are technically not "spam"), and their "unsubscribe" link does not work, I can stop the spam by removing their email address.

2) if the address for company X suddenly starts getting wild amounts of spam, unrelated to company X, I know that it is likely company X has suffered a breach and their email list is "out there". And again I can remove the alias to stop the flood.

Almost all of them all drop into the same single inbox, so I don't have to also check N inboxes for N aliases.

I do this. But rather than set up an alias, I just accept *@mydomain and then filter on the bit before the @. Whenever I put my email address into any online service it is of the form domain.of.service.com@mydomain.

Works a treat

As an aside, 1Password and Fastmail seem to have tie-up call masked mail that aims to do something similar

LinuxBender4y ago

I stopped using canary addresses named after the companies they are for. I just pick a random but realistic looking name and put it in keypass and the mail server. Some companies have started fighting canaries by calling it fraud which it is not. Fraud would be if I had their name in my domain name, not the email address. Why dont they like canaries? It is super easy to tell if they are cross-selling or cross-marketing to you and they don't like it. The most defiant offender I ran into was surprisingly The Tractor Supply Company. The online part of their business has some funny stuff going on. I also ran into this with discord and best buy.

seanwilson4y ago

> unique alias for each account (e.g. github@myname.com, reddit@myname.com, etc.) in order to mitigate spam

Never done this and barely get any spam or had any problems opting-out of stuff later. Wouldn't legit companies like GitHub and Reddit get in big trouble for sending spam you can't opt-out on so this isn't really something to worry about?

Sounds like you'd be far more at risk having your main email displayed publicly online which is almost impossible to avoid in the long run and I don't hear of people getting swamped with spam in these cases.

ingvul4y ago

- one alias for personal/professional correspondence. Own domain

- one alias for everything that is less important than the previous point (e.g., github, netlify, aws). Own domain

- one dummy protonmail inbox for everything else (e.g., reddit, HN, pizza online, etc.)

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