Quote:
Originally Posted by TenFour
With subdomains it is trivial for someone to tie it to you and your main domain, plus it is just more complicated to type in or enter. This is a guarantee your email address will be entered incorrectly by lots of people. I personally find sub domains clunky.
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It's almost always me typing the address (either in some contact form, user's profile form, or the "From" field in an outgoing mail, so even if it's a real person they usually end up either saving my address to their contact list from an a message they received, or their email service or client saves it automatically.
I use me@mydomain only with close friends and family. My students usually start be sending me email from a mailto link somewhere in the university's site to my work address, which is forwarded to my private account, and then I reply form
me@subdomain.mydomain and eventually it continues from there.
My original plan was that whenever I start to get too much spam at some subdomain I can disable the related alias (in Fastmail) so I don't need any discard rules to do it, but actually in 20 years I never needed to do it. I have one subdomain blocked, but it's not really a subdmain I used for email (about 15 years ago I used
me@slasdot.mydomain in my profile at Slashdot, and they posted it publicly as
meNO@SPAMslashdot.mydomain, so after some years I started getting spam at various addresses like
sales@spamslashdot.mydomain,
info@spamslashdot.mydomain, admin@ etc., and after a few more years when that spam became boring I created the alias spamslashdot and blocked it).
I don't think spammers bother trying to figure out domain addresses from subdomain addresses. At least the evidence I have from my use of subdomains is that they don't do it. I guess they did learn to strip the part after the + in me+label@domain because some major providers popularized the use of this form, so having a mass of addresses of this form justifies the effort of cleaning them up for spammers. So whatever slightly differs from the mainstream is probably quite immune to spammers, because they're not interested in it.
Of course if someone believes she or he is being targeted personally then it's quite different. I don't think one can easily hide nowadays, except by trying hide in the crowd, that is trying to not be different from most people in all aspects of life.