One trick I like is that you can use `account+<tag>@example.com` and a lot of services will consider it a separate e-mail address, even though MTAs will transfer it to the same account; this has the added benefit of being easy to filter for on your e-mail client. I also use this tactic when signing up for web services that I anticipate will spam me. (I import a lot of merch from China/Japan; their unsubscribe systems tend to be insanely broken / borderline user hostile. Each such account gets a unique tag so that I know which service is spamming me.)

Alternatively if you want ultimate trust just run your own mailserver and set up as many aliases as you want! For $5/mo you can get a Linode box to do it, and I've yet to get an IP from them that is on an e-mail blacklist. They have great documentation[1], the most important thing is to just make sure your SMTP server requires authentication & refuses to relay for remote hosts. SPF/DKIM are necessary to get past modern spam filters, but frankly if you've ever setup a TLS cert you can probably manage to setup DKIM just fine.

[1]: https://www.linode.com/docs/email/postfix/

I used this trick for years. However, there are downsides.

For example, sometimes a service will let you sign up with this just fine, but later when you need to do something else (such as password reset) or a phone agent has to enter it... it chokes.

Not to mention after some time passes you may forget what the special bit was and have to fall back to searching your email. Being regimented about the naming system helps, but it's not foolproof.

I'm using this trick less and less nowadays and just entering my plain email to avoid these hassles... especially for things like real life accounts. For possibly shady characters and account email consolidation, still a great trick!

This is why I have my own domain. I have a catch-all email box that just accepts everything and can make up emails on the spot, [email protected]. It makes things a lot easier down the road if I have a problem with my current provider as I can change the MX records at will. This means though that my DNS service must be under another domain for safety though but that's less of an issue.

Do you have anything written about the components & configuration, by any chance?

That is actually pretty easy.

1. register domain at a registrar that supports email catch all (I use namecheap, not affiliated)

2. setup email catch all (https://imgur.com/a/PTlzv) with redirect to your "real" email

3. write email to [email protected] -> get's redirected to your "real" email

This has the big advantage that you can change your real email account (I switched away from GMail two years ago) quite easily, you can track who leaks your address and filter more easily. But be prepared to leave some people stunned, I registered at my electricity provider with [email protected] or at my hairdresser with [email protected]

Thanks! (Belated)

In my case I'm using an old grandfathered free google apps setup. So I don't have anything to really setup/configure myself. I know it's possible to do it with postfix and other mailing agents.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-setup-postfix-catch-all-...

Yes, this is the reason I know that the + character is %2b in a url. I've had to manually type it on so many crappy unsubscribe links (they don't realize + needs to be escaped because the web server they are using is doing the old-school + => space translation).

The nice thing about running my own email server is I configured it to use . and _ as well as +. [email protected] and [email protected] are pretty much guaranteed to work, and it ends up exactly the same as the +.

> Not to mention after some time passes you may forget what the special bit was and have to fall back to searching your email

A password manager solves this problem

I knew someone would say this. lol If you're away from your computer and haven't installed the password manager to your phone (I'm not nearly alone in this), then you may need to fall back to searching your emails. Better?

Anyway, this doesn't solve the other technical problems you may hit at some point using this trick.

I'm just giving people a heads up. It's a useful tool for certain things, but it can be overused.

I would recommend not using Linode and realize your e-mail will be terribly unreliable if you run your own e-mail server (even if you setup DKIM, SPF and DMARC. Google/Microsoft don't give a shit about any of that). I wrote a post about this a while back:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...

I've considered moving to Vultr since they block SMTP/25 by default and individual customers have to get it enabled (which seems like it should reduce false positive spam classification as more e-mail providers).

I was just about to comment with this suggestion. A friend of mine uses it for gmail and its great for filtering as you suggested.

Sometimes I feel like I'm last person on the planet who has their own domain and hosts their own email.

I don't host my own email (I've had terrible experiences trying to send), I do have my own domain and let someone else host my email (In this case Google :( but since it's my domain I can change it and it doesn't matter to anyone).

Aside: It always frustrates me when I see a business with their own domain and then an @gmail.com or @aol.com address. What registrars don't offer basic email forwarding (often for free?) or cheap (~$10 email) service you can buy from them if you can't figure out Google for your Domain)?

I feel like there is a small, but profitable space here, I just can't figure out what to do to harness it.

Zoho is pretty much free for personal uses. They charge per user per month, but under 25 users is free, and if you're not a business you don't have that many users.

I have numerous personal projects that are web sites/web apps and I use Zoho to get emails at all those domains.

I don't know if this is frowned upon by Zoho, but if you don't want to use their UI, you can set up your regular personal Gmail account to act as a POP3 client and just retrieves emails from Zoho that way. (now that I wrote it out, it makes me think it can't be frowned upon, simply because POP3 is even offered as a feature there)

I'm still doing this one too - took maybe an hour to configure a simple dovecot+postfix+spamassassin setup and I don't have to touch it beyond an upgrade once every 6 months or so.

Having catchalls at bullshit domains is great.

You aren't the only one. I host mine on linode and have no problems sending now that I have DKIM and SPF set up.

I feel like my company is the last to not use Google and Salesforce... There are a million reasons why Google could lock you out of an account... If I lose my personal email, I will survive. I can't in good faith accept that type of liability for my business communications though.

You're certainly not the only person, I do the same. These stories that keep popping up, about people losing access to their SSO accounts and emails convinced me that it's worth the effort.

You are.

I was like 10th from the last. :)

> My point was, if you use a single account, it's far less likely to get banned

Why do you think that? If anything, you have more activity you can be banned for...

And also, why you say it like gmail is the only email provider? You need separate _email_ accounts, not gmail. It can be some other service or your own domain. Google can be service provider behind your own domain, but you will control address space etc. Nobody will ban you out of your own email address (except domain registrar, but that's unlikely).

It seems like Google uses some heuristics when deciding whether to ban an account. My theory is that if you stick with your personal gmail account, you have such a long history of activity that it's unlikely to be flagged by whatever "smart" algorithm they're using.

I was quite surprised that my gmail account was banned without doing anything remotely malicious. (Certainly not anything listed in https://www.google.com/intl/en-US/%2B/policy/content.html) I suppose it's my word against Google's, which isn't a happy position to be in, but to the best of my knowledge that's what happened.

Regarding other services, I was hoping to get some recommendations about which one everyone likes using. Gmail and FastMail seem to be the two HN favorites, but FastMail gets expensive quickly for side projects. You can host your own email, but people have shared some unpleasant experiences with that route. It's true that you can still use gmail without losing your address, but you'll still lose your emails if they decide to suspend you.

> It seems like Google uses some heuristics when deciding whether to ban an account. My theory is that if you stick with your personal gmail account, you have such a long history of activity that it's unlikely to be flagged by whatever "smart" algorithm they're using.

I never saw/heard of evidence of such behavior.

> but you'll still lose your emails if they decide to suspend you

Emails are easily backupable, you can download them locally and/or forward everything to the "backup" email. One more service to host email on your own domain is Yandex.Mail, it's free and pretty good.

Do keep in mind that Yandex falls under Russian federal law. There was an incident already with FSB getting data about backers of Navalny's anti-corruption website from Yandex Money and if you are vocal on LGBT laws you can easily run afoul of federal children protection law (to protect children from abuse, shocking materials, LGBT, anti-family values, etc.) like the founder of Deti-404 (LGBT support group that even the author of children protection law defended, ironically enough) did.

I'm personally considering hushmail (Canadian) or some other paid email in the future, for maximum piece of mind, any double digit number seems reasonable enough annually. Some out of the way liberal first world country , no superpower (and superspy) aspirations, a small paid provider (that actually needs customers and word of mouth and not throwing their weight around, Google is notorious for deleting YT channels willy nilly for 'guidelines violation' and then restoring them after a shit storm) to ensure no 'smart' 'ML' algorithm bans you. Sounds just about right.

You can use plus addresses for multiple AWS accounts. They're fine with that.

Cool, thanks!

No problem. Fair warning--you'll want to be pretty proactive about going in and killing all their marketing emails, because each and every account gets all of them.

I use fastmail to host my own domain. I alias all users to myself. Any email I get to aliases that don't end in e.g. ".s" automatically goes to a filtered folder. So [email protected] goes to my inbox, [email protected] gets filtered. $5/month is cheap. I only use one domain, but presumably you could even host multiple domains using a similar setup.

AWS requires a different email address per account yes. I don't see how it's bad? In your case, if you lost access to one gmail account with a dozen AWS accounts attached to it, that would affect all your AWS accounts? Better to have them fully separated so they can't affect each other.

> Doesn't this require separate gmail addresses?

It probably should, but I somehow ended up with two Amazon accounts (retail, not AWS) with the same email address. Changing the password I use changes which account I log in to.

Presumably it's a bug, but it's certainly confusing.

I recently managed to do that as well. This becomes very interesting if you try to recover a password, because apparently the password recovery only recovers the last account.

Eventually I got out of that by changing the mail of whatever account I could log into, using gmails feature of ignoring everything between the first + and an @ in the address. But most annoying, now my aws login is something silly like [email protected].

Maybe I could change that back, but I'm too scared to touch that.

> FastMail is worth paying for, but it's too expensive for one-off side projects.

FastMail will let you create multiple aliases, either at your own domain, or one of theirs, linked to your account.

Find a webhost or DNS registrar that will do autoforwarding. I have a personal domain with a bunch of emails for specific things.

AWS accounts require separate email addresses, which may OR MAY NOT happen to be provided by Gmail.

I have had a half-dozen gmail accounts over the past 10 years and all are active with no problem.

Use aliases. It possible even in gmail. Or host your mailing and use aliases.

Multiple gmail addresses is not a bad idea, but a highly supported and recommended setup.

Mine was banned with no notice after weeks of work. So I'm just putting this out there as a warning that gmail can crush you at any time with no recourse.

Of course they can - but that is yet another reason to rather rely on multiple gmail accounts if the alternative is a single gmail account.

If you use a single gmail account, it seems far less likely to get banned. I think I was caught in some sort of automatic purge, since I certainly wasn't abusing anything or using it for much beyond my side projects.

This email hostage situation kind of sucks. Hopefully there's an alternative for scenarios like this.

Someone mentioned self-hosting upthread. I wonder how difficult that is.

I have numerous Gmail accounts (more than 20) and not a single one has been banned. And Google explicitly supports using multiple accounts by providing an account switcher. Perhaps your account was banned for some reason other than being a duplicate.

Maybe so, but they won't tell me why it was banned. That alone should give people pause. There were a lot of resources tied to that account.

Here's the closest thing to a list of reasons I could find: https://www.google.com/intl/en-US/%2B/policy/content.html

I didn't engage in illegal activities, malicious or deceptive practices, hate speech, harassment, distributing personal information, child exploitation, spam, ranking manipulation, distribution of sexually explicit material, violence, selling regulated goods and services, impersonation, account hijacking, or use multiple accounts to bypass the above policies. So I have no idea what I did -- Google won't say, and all attempts to get more info out of them failed.