Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

Re:Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username e... by jawns on Monday August 15, 2022 @11:50AM (#32471211)

I've seen a shift. Between 2005-2010, I used [company]@[mydomain.com], and I noticed that I would get spam in the form of [gibberish]@[mydomain.com], presumably from spammers who were just targeting email addresses with a catch-call filter. In fact, around that time, my hosting provider, Dreamhost, started restricting email catch-alls to deal with this problem.

But then from around 2010 onward, that type of spam became much less common, and nowadays it's as you say. The vast majority, probably 90%, come from compromised accounts, like linkedin@[mydomain.com]. The rest hit the unique email addresses I have submitted in domain registration forms.

That's even more surprising considering that I've since shifted to using [username]+[company]@[mydomain.com]. Spammers could pretty easily strip off the `+[company]`, but I haven't seen that happen much.

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Re:Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username e... by stormbrew on Monday August 15, 2022 @12:17PM (#32471589)

The gibberish name ones may be targeting backscatter. They might have a reply-to with the address they're really targeting.

And that may have dropped off because there was a concerted effort to make it harder to do that around then. In particular, that's kind of what killed qmail as an in-vogue MTA, because it wasn't being updated and you had to use awkward patches to stop backscatter.

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Re:Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username e... by bombcar on Monday August 15, 2022 @12:07PM (#32471448)

We've successfully pushed spam down hard enough that the only people spamming are people who never even see your email address; it's all computerized and they just don't care at all to try to do anything to clean up the lists.

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