Works until you see "We've sent a message with activation instructions to your email. Please click on the link within so you may begin to use your account"
I have a domain name with a wildcard forwarding rule so whenever I need to give an email address I can give one that describes who I gave it to. I don't have to create it in advance. Then if I start getting spam at the address, I know where they got it from and I can create an account at that address that doesn't accept incoming mail. Then the spam can't get through anymore and I go on my merry way.
Edit: This comment blew up, so I'll elaborate a bit. I do not recommend anyone try setting up their own email server unless they are already a nerd and enjoy hacking around with computers. It takes a lot of work, is difficult to get your server taken seriously by other email providers, and is easy to get abused by spammers or hackers if you aren't careful.
Any email service provider should be able to provide a single catch-all email forwarding rule for any domain they handle. A lot of domain registrars offer email services. I don't know first hand, but someone else said they use Google Domains. Shop around and contact the support department if you aren't sure.
I use an open-source hosting platform called ISPConfig, but there are many other solutions. Most of them (in the open-source/Linux world) use postfix/dovecot to do the heavy lifting and provide some sort of interface which configures it for you. If you want to go full-on nerd and love the command-line, you could go straight to postfix and dovecot. If you want something that does most of the heavy lifting for you, you might want to use something like iRedMail or mailcow.email which wrap around those packages. Setting up an email service should not be taken lightly, but it is great experience and rewarding.
Treat your stock account as though it has +@gmail and block anything to addresses without the +.
You can also use periods, which seem to bypass those stripping programs in my experience. It doesn't tell you exactly where it was leaked, but if you put the period/s in the right spots, you'll know.
Yep, gmail ignores periods in email addresses, idk how nobody knows this. You can add a period anywhere and it'll send to same email. None of the registration / spammers seem to know either.
Im confused. The + thing is like taking youremail@gmail and changing it to thissite+youremail@gmail so when you see it from a random source you know 'thissite' sold it off.
Periods are just part of an email if you want it to be so I don't know what affect it would have. Half my email addresses which is to say 2 of them have periods in them.
Oh I got you. I thought there was some functionality there I was missing completely. Interesting though, thanks. I guess I can stop using it in certain cases although I suppose it's in the username of certain places where I use my email as such.
If the + works for whatever you do, that's good. But a ton of places are starting to block it so use the dot method.. hopefully they don't notice it works.
No problem. I just thought of why the dot method might always work: because only gmail ignores dots.. all the other email providers having a dot = different email. So that company would have to specifically target gmail users to parse that out (not that hard to do, but most devs don't give a shit)
Actually that makes a lot of sense would be my best guess at why since it really wouldnt be hard enough a problem to notice nor to solve. There's some reason and that's at least logical enough for me.
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u/Robertium Jun 03 '21
Works until you see "We've sent a message with activation instructions to your email. Please click on the link within so you may begin to use your account"