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iamben 11 hours ago

I'm interested. How does it differ from using:

name+service@gmail.com or service@myowndomain.com

...to figure out where the spam originated?

buu700 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> service@myowndomain.com

Just be aware that this may be very confusing to customer support agents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32475178

rsync 10 hours ago | parent [-]

FWIW, I have been using the companyname@mydomain.com auto-alias for many years now and I've never had it challenged nor rejected by a human or a machine.

chrismorgan an hour ago | parent [-]

I’ve also been doing it for quite a few years, and I think I had it rejected by a machine once, and I had it questioned by a human once.

I’ve had way more problems from systems that think TLDs are two or three characters (which has never been true).

loloquwowndueo 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everybody knows name+something@ maps to name@ so it’s trivial for bad actors to strip the plus part and just spam you directly, losing the per-correspondent distinction.

homebrewer 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Which is covered by GP's second suggestion. I add short random password-like strings to these aliases to thwart spammers who might be trying obvious aliases, turning e.g paypal@example.com into paypal.nsi873g@example.com

loloquwowndueo 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I probably didn’t explain myself well.

On Gmail foo+bar@gmail.com is an “alias” for foo@gmail.com. So if you give someone foo+randomstring@gmail.com hoping that will help you map random string to that particular sender, you’re fucked - because anyone who sees foo+randomstring@gmail.com knows it’s an alias for foo@gmail.com, they can just email that directly and bypass your cleverness.

If you’re using a sane alias provider like you described, then it’s likely not an issue.

9 hours ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
sans_souse 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In the latter specifically it doesn't differ except for the specific methodology and what we do with the results.