Phone numbers too. Can you imagine if you could give out a different phone number to each company and you could put a call limit, allowed call times, as well as a date expiration on the phone number you gave out. It could all be linked to specific companies, where if you got a spam call, you could report it and the company you entrusted it with would get a fine, or possibly the call would simply not go through.

The email service Hey (from the makers of Basecamp) has a feature where the first time someone emails you it goes into a screening bucket. You can then approve those senders who are allowed to email you. If you don't approve, you don't see the emails anymore.

I initially signed up for the trail when the service launched. The first or second time I went to check the site/app it wasn't working. I was pretty much done with it at that point. I probably should have given it more of a chance and maybe they worked that out, but at $99/year for email my tolerance for issues is pretty low. They did (I suppose still do) have a lot of neat ideas around email though.

Actually, centralized databases like DNS are a symptom of a larger problem: society is so used to the idea that you can centralize power, votes, money etc. in one place. It is why we have celebrities and state governments, and privately owned social networks. It is also why smart contracts are still based around blockchains and they allow weird things like flash loans, because only one transactiom can run at a time for the whole world.

So the problem is that bill.gates@gmail.com or bill@microsoft.com is accessible to anyone who can use the SMTP protocol. And a phone number is accessible to anyone who texts it. That’s crazy.

Instead, we shouldn’t have DNS or centralized domains at all. DNS is just a glorified search engine that only really helps you find the root resource at a site, the /index.html thing. The vast majority of URLs on the Web aren’t going to be verbally shared anyway so you may as well store them as non-human-readable strings and let people save some local or hosted index. The titles and other metadata can be taken just like google does.

In this case, sending an email would require the recipient to have given out a capability that was received by you. And if some capability was compromised, they’d just deactivate it. It’s like this dude’s email aliases, but far better

I think it's simply a hybrid approach: you'd handle those unknown contacts with many:1 addresses (since there's no real alternative, as you imply), and you'd handle most known contacts with 1:1 addresses.

A benefit is that you might let messages to some or all of those 1:1 addresses be sorted one way (e.g., they ping you) while messages to some or all of the many:1 addresses are sorted another way (e.g., you only check for them with a much longer interval). But then again, a diligently-maintained contact list can be leveraged to achieve same...

To take the tracking logic further, I think you'd do `businesscard-<date for that particular print run>@example.com`, `<name of conference>-<year>@example.com`, `<name of mailing list>@example.com` etc. Maybe come up with something snazzy yet still unique-ish for the presentation slides.

In practice, I suspect the intention is mostly to use catch-all addresses for situations where the email address is a key in a database and like a login and stuff and not an entry in an individual's contacts list.

hello@mycatchall.com

Or if for a specific forum - hello_slashdot@mycatchall.com