I do servicename@firstname.surna.me, carreer@firstname.surna.me etc.

I like Zoho. It can be free as long as you use the web/mobile app. If you want to use your own email software, it's $1/mo for the lowest paid tier.

Then you're going to get spammed to hell, live with it.

There's no spam filters that will protect you 100% from putting the same email address everywhere.

Using personalized aliases for everything and never showing a public address if you can help it is the only way to fight spam these days.

Tell us you don't understand how the "From" header works without telling us.

FYI, that is really just a text string. Most providers don't let you change it, but its not exactly hard to falsify. People are largely ignorant of the fact that email mostly isnt trustworthy. Spammers abuse this ignorance constantly.

In order to send email as another address, gmail requires you to verify the address by sending you an email there first. AFAIK, they never re-verify, but that's the main weakness I see.

It’s actually built on Haraka. All of the queueing is custom written so I can do things like make it a flip of a toggle whether you want push notifications, sender screening, mark as read, etc. for a label. And there’s no inbox, since the bare address is not a usable address. Every email you receive already has at least one label.

Ok but you can do this with aliases with any decent email service.

As far as I know, there’s no email provider that lets you choose to enable sender screening on individual aliases. I also don’t know of any that explicitly do not use the bare address.

You can kind of achieve the same thing with Sieve scripts and a catch-all address (which is how I developed the prototype), but there is a lot that Port87 does automatically that you’d have to do manually in that system.

For example, you don’t need to set up a label before you use it with Port87. You can just give out a yourname-whatever@port87.com address and it will create the whatever label for you. These labels show up in your “Pending Labels” section. You can then approve them to move them into your regular labels, block them, or just let them expire.

I wrote this service around this concept, so it’s not like you’re using a regular email system a special way. The system is designed and built to be used this way.

Isn’t it pretty widely known that many email providers support this?

Personally I'm not a fan of "plus aliasing" because it gives away your base address, and it's trivial for spammers to strip the alias. I prefer aliases that completely hide the base address.

Yes. It is pretty easy to work around, but if that is the only tool you have it still can be used to junk a majority of the crap.

If you want a robust solution you can use disposable aliases (which are basically randomly generated) or signed addresses.

I do the latter. So I would generate an email like lemmy-example-59273625@kevincox.ca. If you strip or change the string at the end (which is a small HMAC) your message will go straight to junk. It isn't perfect because there is only 4 bytes of entropy in the signature but a dedicated attacker will find a better way to spam me anyways.

They don't need to randomize it, just strip it.

What I do is have some general mailboxes then signed addresses on top of that.

So if you email blog@ or kevincox@ you will get a fairly high level of spam filtering. I also have a few other "memorable" addresses that get reduced spam filtering. If you use the unique signed address that I use for signing up to services, newsletters or whatever where the address is private to a specific service then you basically skip spam filtering. Of course if you abuse that privilege then I will outright block the signed address.

Basically by allowing friends and "trusted" services through the spam filter I can crank up the difficulty for unknown senders.

Why can't you use +-aliases in Git, Mastodon, etc.?

Edit: git config --local user.email "something+someotherstuff@example.com" shouldn't cause any issues.