The sad part is when your email leaks from big companies, you definitely know. I started getting viagra spam delivered to [email protected] back in 2007, long before their "big data breach", so it was only a matter of time before that companies pattern of poor security caught up with them.
Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody who happens to have your address.
That does seem beneficial for the most part, but do you have ideas about how to handle the use cases like establishing new relationships (what, if anything, do you put on business cards?) or allowing the general public or a broad audience to contact you (what, if anything, do you put in advertisements, on your web site, on slides of a conference presentation, in an e-mail signature on mailing lists?).
- allow work calls and disallow family calls 9-5 weekdays only - allow family calls but not work calls to bypass do not disturb by ringing a second time - allow annoying acquaintance who wants tech support to only call on weekends, and to only ring on second call - if working two jobs, prevent each workplace from calling during other workplace's scheduled hours - add geofencing. don't allow community/neighbor calls while at work.
Basically, just add rules for each contact/group for when your phone will ring. Android used to have multiple sound profiles available, and IIRC allowed you to change the volume and default ringer, these could be activated automatically on a schedule. Now we only have Do Not Disturb, and that's it.
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.
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...
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.
So the problem is that [email protected] or [email protected] 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
Or if for a specific forum - [email protected]
Ideally, this would also be the case for physical mail. Multiple revokable tokens, not publicly tied to your physical address.
The whole idea of revokable tokens would pose an issue for any company that sends bills, as I assume revoking address tokens would be common with them. I'm sure there are many situations like this.
Welcome to the 19th century! Which is when mail redirection to a new address was introduced in the UK. I'd be amazed if it wasn't around then or earlier in the USA as well. Simply fill out a form and your mail will be redirected for up to two years (albeit at a cost). Or use a PO box and a mail forwarding service which offers filtering of junk mail. I used one for years when I used to move around a lot for less than £100 a year.
That’s not the same thing. Everyone still has your old address and you need to update it with them. Not terribly painful if you move once every 5 years. Pretty annoying and error prone if you move every 6 months.
A PO box would be fine, but it's not an acceptable address with many businesses, so it's not a universal solution to the problem.
Type something like P0 B0X
Type the address of the post office and then the PO Box number like an apartment number
Panicked phone call from a jeweller who wanted to know how and why '[their] domain was in my email address'; think he sort of understood once I explained, but still said something like 'can't be too careful in this business' - well sure ok but what am I going to do with.. oh nevermind!
Password lockout/reset over the phone, reading my 100ch 'memorable phrase' as generated by pass... Gave the guy a good chuckle, and no he was not willing to concede by the umpteenth 'upper case A' or 'backward slash' that I obviously 'knew' the phrase and could surely be relieved from reciting the entire thing... I use shorter ones now.
You would hope it wouldn’t work, but it probably will.
So, your "favorite city" could be i.e. HorsecrackBay Griennstone.
I can't tell you how many non-techy people think I'm part of their company because I have yourcompany@mydomain. Sigh. Big companies have ruined the internet by having everyone have @gmail or @hotmail or something.
Sure, you can add "+thing" after the username portion, but those that know this bog standard trick can still automatically derive your email address and get around your filters. At least with a dedicated username portion a human has to think for a second.
Not if you default the other way around and autodelete all mail that doesn't have a "+thing". :V
1) Use dots (period or full stop) between letters in the username part of your email address. For example, if your email is [email protected] then [email protected] and [email protected] also get routed to you.
2) Use @googlemail.com instead of @gmail.com in your email address.
I have a Gmail address and I use these other variations whenever a company rejects email addresses with + in them.
Two stories as well:
a) After contacting a company, I got a mail from their legal department asking me to explain why I’m using their trademarked name in my email
b) Using an online-shop that requires emailing the owner for your order (so he can send you a PayPal invoice and then snail-mail you the music CDs you ordered…) I got a personal message attached of him asking why his label’s name is in my email address.
In both cases, a short explanation was sufficient, though.
> The truth is no one really sells your email
The reason I started doing this was to monitor if someone would transfer my address, and it's never happened. You also get more spam because every firstname@yourdomain works.
But the weird interactions are good! Last year I wanted to get my kid in a somewhat selective middle school (in France) and the fact that the email I was registered with was name_of_school@mydomain helped, because the principal was convinced I was and always had been a huge fan of the school, to have my email named after them...
People simply don't understand you can have more than one email address -- let alone a million. That's kind of fun.
I missed out on a dentist appointment because of this. They thought I was a robot. I blame gmail.
Regardless, I still regret nothing, seeing my spam free "catch all" mailbox compared to my spam infested decade old web mail is all I need to know it was the right choice.
I am really tired of people selling my burner phone to the credit people; and no, I don't own that phone number. Prove I do.
Take my local credit union. Please. Jackasses let someone have access to my checking account. I don't bank online with them either, or I didn't, but last summer was trying to talk to them about a refi and I had to register online and they wanted a phone for 2FA. So of course instead of calling the land line, which is clearly and incontrovertibly mine, they called the burner. Several times.
Eventually I answered it with "fuck you you frauds" and they were "oooh sir, call me back on my direct line" so I tried... from my land line in the same area code, you get the idea... and their system won't route the call to their fraud department. So I ignored them for a couple of weeks.
Seriously they were so incompetent that when the actual fraudsters were probing, the first transaction was a /deposit/. When they were finally trying to clean their mess up, they /credited/ me the same amount. I'm the one who figured it out and told them well you gave me 2x their original deposit, when you really should have debited the amount in the first place.
People like that are not going to safeguard your information.
Ob relevance: I have my own reasons for not wildcarding domains and use this instead: https://github.com/m3047/trualias
When someone tries to call into a provider and impersonate you, to take over your account… they would fail because they don’t know your login even!
Whereas, for most people, they’d sweet talk the person on the other line into resetting the password. Happened to me with GoDaddy, they almost rerouted my @mydomain.com email and then it would have been really bad
Some businesses freak out that "that's our domain name, we own it, you can't possibly use it".
To placate them I'll spell it backwards or give a related name that I can still work out the source. eg. fleet2022@ if I'm renting a car
Not as exciting as getting accused of trademark infringement, but it’s interesting how people interpret these things.
Like... delivery guy asked and?..
Personally I had a similar conversation only once and only because it was a one-man AliBaba reseller shop, so he personally processed all orders.
Two stories:
I don't use mails like facebook@domain uber@domain - that's too obvious. And knowing that may often disclose that I actually have an account registered on given page. I don't want that, so I go full random, using few words I have in mind, current few words from the song I'm listening too, etc. So password manager helps me with e-mails too.
But Sometimes when a website annoys me (stupid rules for passwords, crippled UX for forms, because re-writing a select component in javascript is such a brilliant idea, etc) I tend to insult the company I'm registering with using my e-mail or password, I mean mail: [email protected] and pass: goDieInPain1312323$$$$. Once I registered account for a supermarket loyality card with some very little insult towards the supermarket. Later I got some huge amount of the points collected and their system crashed and I had to contact the support (the bonus was too high for me to give up on that). First via e-mail then via phone, when they were confirming my address. They helped me and said nothing about the name I was using.
Another story:
When I started with catch-all I was actually using mails like companyname@mydomain, and when I once contacted them via phone the person talking with me was not very into tech I think and were accusing me of... I don't really know exactly, but she told me something about me using their stuff without their acceptance, when I tried to explain that's my own domain she told me I cannot use their name, because that's a copyright infringement. Weird.