Plus addressing / aliases

CyberDyne · 4 Feb 2024, 07:34 PM

Has anything changed with regard to creating new aliases?

I’ve always sent emails with the name of the recipient as a unique address for spam identification purposes; eg: ‘retailer’ @ myalias . fastmail . com

That way, if I receive any spam, I know exactly where that specific email address was used and most likely to have been compromised.

However, I’ve just attempted to create a new sending address and the option of using an alias no longer appears. ie: after creating ‘user1 @ fastmail . com’ , ‘x @ user1 . fastmail . com’ no longer appears as an option (on the iOS app. and web).

Am I missing something?
Thanks

n5bb · 5 Feb 2024, 08:26 AM

It works great once you find how to set it up. The trick is in Fastmail Help:
Sending email from a plus or subdomain address

Here are all of the steps required to make this work well:

Create the new alias at either a Fastmail domain or your personal domain at:
Settings>My email addresses>Add address>Create an alias
Then create the special wildcard alias used for sending at:
Settings>My email addresses>Add address>Add an address you already own
Enter the wildcard address at the subdomain, such as “*@myalias.fastmail.com”.
Click Show advanced preferences at the bottom of the page.
Scroll down to Nickname and enter the subdomain address including the @ symbol but without the wildcard *, such as “@myalias.fastmail.com”.
Now when you click Compose to start a new message and open the From box (above the To address), you will see all of your subdomain addresses alphabetically listed at the top of the list, since “@“ sorts to the top.
After selecting a subdomain address you will see the From addressing box containing a field for you to enter the alias for that message at the desired subdomain.
You can edit any existing wildcard entries so that the Nickname is in the format I recommend, starting with @ so they all sort at the top. Of course, if you don’t want them to sort to the top you could use a different Nickname, such as “Wildcard myalias”. The From display name can also be edited for each wildcard subdomain.

Bill

CyberDyne · 5 Feb 2024, 01:22 PM

I didn’t think for one minute it would have been moved to under “An address you already own” as I always looked at these as ‘borrowed’ addresses (since I didn’t actually ‘own’ the domain).
Hope you’re well Bill.
Thank you as always.

hadaso · 5 Feb 2024, 06:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CyberDyne

... I always looked at these as ‘borrowed’ addresses (since I didn’t actually ‘own’ the domain)....

Even if it's "your own domain" ypu don't really own it, you just rent it (or lease).

n5bb · 6 Feb 2024, 03:57 AM

If you lease something (such as a car or a house), you have no ownership rights. You can’t choose to sell it to someone else and don’t control the title to the property. If you damage the item while you are renting it, you are responsible to the rightful title owner to repair the property to good working order, with only the expectation of normal wear and tear due to your use of the property.

If you own something (such as a domain name, house, or car), you DO have ownership rights. You have the title to the item. If you borrowed money to purchase the property and used the property as collateral, the lien holder might have a superior right and could take control if you didn’t make timely payments.

So I insist that I DO own my personal domain. The domain registry charges are effectively a tax, and just as if you don’t pay your real property or automobile tax payments, you can lose control of the domain if you don’t satisfy the domain registration “tax”. But while you own the domain you can sell it to someone else, just as a car or a house which you own rather than rent.

Bill

Grhm · 6 Feb 2024, 10:12 AM

Bill's reply touches on a question that has long puzzled me.
I'm unfamiliar with the US legal system, but I assume that the "lien holder" of an American house is roughly equivalent to "freeholder"of an English one.
The right of a freeholder to receive payment from a leaseholder for continued use of the land derives from the fact that the land has always existed, and that at some time in the past the freeholder has legitimately bought the freehold from its previous owner. The logic is clear and, within its own terms, just (provided of course that the house isn't built on illegally occupied, stolen land).
But when it comes to internet domains, which don't exist until someone "buys" them, who exactly is the equivalent of the "lien holder/ freeholder", and from where derives their right to charge the domain "owner" for its use?
It seems to me to be backwards. Before I dreamt up and registered my domain name with a "registrar", it didn't exist. So by what authority can another person lay claim to ownership of it? Who is that person and, given that the domain had never previously existed, how can they legitimately and justly have acquired that right?

n5bb · 6 Feb 2024, 11:29 AM

I think you should consider domain names (and IP addresses) as “intellectual property”. There is a need to manage the IP address and domain name systems and provide ongoing funding for maintaining the infrastructure which allows the internet to operate. A bit of history might illuminate why a funded infrastructure for network routing is necessary and how it evolved.

Network connections are made between nodes with numeric IP addresses. The original internet (as known to the general public) relied on IPv4 32-bit addresses, which have been in use for 43 years. Somewhere I still have some printed internet directory which were the equivalent of telephone directories. In olden times (before the late 1990’s) you could pick up a telephone directory which showed the telephone numbers of individuals and businesses in your town or metropolitan area. So you could look up “Byrom, Bill” and find my phone number (and physical street address) in Austin, Texas. Similarly, in the mid-1990’s you could look up a website by its name in a published book and find the IPv4 address for that site. You would then type that address into the browser address bar to reach that website (or other internet resource). At a high level, the last IPv4 address block was assigned in 2011. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so there is a much much larger address space.

But who wants to use long numbers to visit websites? The Domain Name Syatem (DNS) provided a method of looking up a registered domain name and resolving it to a numerical IP address. This system also contains MX records to find the IP address hosting email for a domain. Some organization was needed to manage both the IP address assignment and domain name assignment, and resolution of lookups for those addresses and names. This organization is currently ICANN. Without some organization responsible for resolving domain names, your browser would have no way to determine the IP address of the server containing your website, and an email sending server would not be able to contact the server hosting email for your domain. It takes ongoing funding to keep these things working, so that’s why you have fees charged to you by a reselling registrar to secure your domain name at a high-level domain (such as .com or .net), and pay for the ultimate resolution of the domain name to find where the DNS information for that domain is stored.

All of these things take money to keep going, so that’s why you pay essentially intellectual property fees to buy and keep a domain name. If you consider all real estate property (land rights) in a country to ultimately be originally owned (before any individual bought that land) by the government of that country, ICAAN maintains your right to the intellectual property that was “coined” when you registered your domain name. The top-level domain or TLD (.com, .net, .org, etc.) portion of the domain name is already in existence, and you are registering a full domain name with some similarity to someone registering a trademark. Just like a trademark, you own the full domain name but have to pay a fee to register and maintain that name. If you didn’t pay a fee for ICANN and the registrars, nobody could make use of your domain name.

Bill

hadaso · 7 Feb 2024, 12:14 AM

When I buy a house or a car, I pay the previous owner and then it's mine. I have to pay some taxes to the state, such as to renew the registration of my car, or property taxes on my house, or city taxes on my house. If I don't pay those taxes, I still own my car or house. If I don't renew registration of my car, it remains mine. I'm just not allowed to drive it on a public road. I can keep it in my back yard and grow onions in it, or dismantle it and sell the parts (which is sadly what I needed to do with my 2000 Nissan Almera). If I don't pay the property taxes on my house, then I owe money to my government. I still own the house and the lot it is built on. If I take a loan to pay for the house or the car that I buy, then I enter a contract with whoever is lending the money (usually some bank or other financial institute), and in that contract I agree to turn over my property rights to the lender in case I fail in paying back the loan. So I may lose the ownership of my house or car if I don't return the money that was lent to me, but that is because I agreed to this in a contract with the lender of the money.
But when i register a domain, I have to renew the registration every year, usually for the same price that I pay for registering any other domain under the same TLD, and if I don't pay then immediately that domain is not mine, and anyone else can register that domain. To me this seems like a rental agreement with an option to renew if the option is taken before the end of the rental term.

BritTim · 9 Feb 2024, 02:56 PM

The nearest analogy I can think of for a domain name is a phone number. There is a minimum fee necessary to keep the phone number (or domain name) active under your name. Depending on what you use the phone (or domain) for, additional costs can arise, but (whether these are paid or not) they do not affect your rights to the phone number (or domain name).

In both cases, there is a central authority that grants you rights to the phone number (or domain name) under certain conditions and subject to payment of the basic fees. I would argue that the ultimate ownership lies with that authority, although they delegate most of those rights to you for a limited period. Depending on the phone company (or registrar) fees will vary, and are subject to change.

The "ownership" of the right to register a domain for you varies according to the top level of the domain name and rules determined by a central naming authority (IANA). Those with control of the top level domains, in turn, can determine rules for registration of sub domains. Those with ownership of the rights to some top level domains can (and do) charge extortionate fees for allowing you to register selected names under that .tld, and are able (with little recourse on your part) to demand unreasonable amounts of money for you to retain your rights to your domain name. These costs have nothing to do with engineering running costs, but are a straight money grab.

4 Feb 2024, 07:34 PM	#1
CyberDyne Master of the @ Join Date: Sep 2004 Posts: 1,583	Plus addressing / aliases Has anything changed with regard to creating new aliases? I’ve always sent emails with the name of the recipient as a unique address for spam identification purposes; eg: ‘retailer’ @ myalias . fastmail . com That way, if I receive any spam, I know exactly where that specific email address was used and most likely to have been compromised. However, I’ve just attempted to create a new sending address and the option of using an alias no longer appears. ie: after creating ‘user1 @ fastmail . com’ , ‘x @ user1 . fastmail . com’ no longer appears as an option (on the iOS app. and web). Am I missing something? Thanks Last edited by CyberDyne : 4 Feb 2024 at 07:38 PM. Reason: Grammar

5 Feb 2024, 08:26 AM	#2
n5bb Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: May 2004 Location: Irving, Texas Posts: 8,929	How to configure wildcard subdomain sending address It works great once you find how to set it up. The trick is in Fastmail Help: Sending email from a plus or subdomain address Here are all of the steps required to make this work well: Create the new alias at either a Fastmail domain or your personal domain at: Settings>My email addresses>Add address>Create an alias Then create the special wildcard alias used for sending at: Settings>My email addresses>Add address>Add an address you already own Enter the wildcard address at the subdomain, such as “@myalias.fastmail.com”. Click Show advanced preferences* at the bottom of the page. Scroll down to Nickname and enter the subdomain address including the @ symbol but without the wildcard *, such as “@myalias.fastmail.com”. Now when you click Compose to start a new message and open the From box (above the To address), you will see all of your subdomain addresses alphabetically listed at the top of the list, since “@“ sorts to the top. After selecting a subdomain address you will see the From addressing box containing a field for you to enter the alias for that message at the desired subdomain. You can edit any existing wildcard entries so that the Nickname is in the format I recommend, starting with @ so they all sort at the top. Of course, if you don’t want them to sort to the top you could use a different Nickname, such as “Wildcard myalias”. The From display name can also be edited for each wildcard subdomain. Bill

5 Feb 2024, 01:22 PM	#3
CyberDyne Master of the @ Join Date: Sep 2004 Posts: 1,583	I didn’t think for one minute it would have been moved to under “An address you already own” as I always looked at these as ‘borrowed’ addresses (since I didn’t actually ‘own’ the domain). Hope you’re well Bill. Thank you as always.

6 Feb 2024, 03:57 AM	#5
n5bb Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: May 2004 Location: Irving, Texas Posts: 8,929	If you lease something (such as a car or a house), you have no ownership rights. You can’t choose to sell it to someone else and don’t control the title to the property. If you damage the item while you are renting it, you are responsible to the rightful title owner to repair the property to good working order, with only the expectation of normal wear and tear due to your use of the property. If you own something (such as a domain name, house, or car), you DO have ownership rights. You have the title to the item. If you borrowed money to purchase the property and used the property as collateral, the lien holder might have a superior right and could take control if you didn’t make timely payments. So I insist that I DO own my personal domain. The domain registry charges are effectively a tax, and just as if you don’t pay your real property or automobile tax payments, you can lose control of the domain if you don’t satisfy the domain registration “tax”. But while you own the domain you can sell it to someone else, just as a car or a house which you own rather than rent. Bill

6 Feb 2024, 10:12 AM	#6
Grhm Essential Contributor Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: UK Posts: 270	Bill's reply touches on a question that has long puzzled me. I'm unfamiliar with the US legal system, but I assume that the "lien holder" of an American house is roughly equivalent to "freeholder"of an English one. The right of a freeholder to receive payment from a leaseholder for continued use of the land derives from the fact that the land has always existed, and that at some time in the past the freeholder has legitimately bought the freehold from its previous owner. The logic is clear and, within its own terms, just (provided of course that the house isn't built on illegally occupied, stolen land). But when it comes to internet domains, which don't exist until someone "buys" them, who exactly is the equivalent of the "lien holder/ freeholder", and from where derives their right to charge the domain "owner" for its use? It seems to me to be backwards. Before I dreamt up and registered my domain name with a "registrar", it didn't exist. So by what authority can another person lay claim to ownership of it? Who is that person and, given that the domain had never previously existed, how can they legitimately and justly have acquired that right?

6 Feb 2024, 11:29 AM	#7
n5bb Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: May 2004 Location: Irving, Texas Posts: 8,929	I think you should consider domain names (and IP addresses) as “intellectual property”. There is a need to manage the IP address and domain name systems and provide ongoing funding for maintaining the infrastructure which allows the internet to operate. A bit of history might illuminate why a funded infrastructure for network routing is necessary and how it evolved. Network connections are made between nodes with numeric IP addresses. The original internet (as known to the general public) relied on IPv4 32-bit addresses, which have been in use for 43 years. Somewhere I still have some printed internet directory which were the equivalent of telephone directories. In olden times (before the late 1990’s) you could pick up a telephone directory which showed the telephone numbers of individuals and businesses in your town or metropolitan area. So you could look up “Byrom, Bill” and find my phone number (and physical street address) in Austin, Texas. Similarly, in the mid-1990’s you could look up a website by its name in a published book and find the IPv4 address for that site. You would then type that address into the browser address bar to reach that website (or other internet resource). At a high level, the last IPv4 address block was assigned in 2011. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, so there is a much much larger address space. But who wants to use long numbers to visit websites? The Domain Name Syatem (DNS) provided a method of looking up a registered domain name and resolving it to a numerical IP address. This system also contains MX records to find the IP address hosting email for a domain. Some organization was needed to manage both the IP address assignment and domain name assignment, and resolution of lookups for those addresses and names. This organization is currently ICANN. Without some organization responsible for resolving domain names, your browser would have no way to determine the IP address of the server containing your website, and an email sending server would not be able to contact the server hosting email for your domain. It takes ongoing funding to keep these things working, so that’s why you have fees charged to you by a reselling registrar to secure your domain name at a high-level domain (such as .com or .net), and pay for the ultimate resolution of the domain name to find where the DNS information for that domain is stored. All of these things take money to keep going, so that’s why you pay essentially intellectual property fees to buy and keep a domain name. If you consider all real estate property (land rights) in a country to ultimately be originally owned (before any individual bought that land) by the government of that country, ICAAN maintains your right to the intellectual property that was “coined” when you registered your domain name. The top-level domain or TLD (.com, .net, .org, etc.) portion of the domain name is already in existence, and you are registering a full domain name with some similarity to someone registering a trademark. Just like a trademark, you own the full domain name but have to pay a fee to register and maintain that name. If you didn’t pay a fee for ICANN and the registrars, nobody could make use of your domain name. Bill

7 Feb 2024, 12:14 AM	#8
hadaso The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Holon, Israel. Posts: 4,853	When I buy a house or a car, I pay the previous owner and then it's mine. I have to pay some taxes to the state, such as to renew the registration of my car, or property taxes on my house, or city taxes on my house. If I don't pay those taxes, I still own my car or house. If I don't renew registration of my car, it remains mine. I'm just not allowed to drive it on a public road. I can keep it in my back yard and grow onions in it, or dismantle it and sell the parts (which is sadly what I needed to do with my 2000 Nissan Almera). If I don't pay the property taxes on my house, then I owe money to my government. I still own the house and the lot it is built on. If I take a loan to pay for the house or the car that I buy, then I enter a contract with whoever is lending the money (usually some bank or other financial institute), and in that contract I agree to turn over my property rights to the lender in case I fail in paying back the loan. So I may lose the ownership of my house or car if I don't return the money that was lent to me, but that is because I agreed to this in a contract with the lender of the money. But when i register a domain, I have to renew the registration every year, usually for the same price that I pay for registering any other domain under the same TLD, and if I don't pay then immediately that domain is not mine, and anyone else can register that domain. To me this seems like a rental agreement with an option to renew if the option is taken before the end of the rental term.

9 Feb 2024, 02:56 PM	#9
BritTim The "e" in e-mail Join Date: May 2003 Location: mostly in Thailand Posts: 3,095	The nearest analogy I can think of for a domain name is a phone number. There is a minimum fee necessary to keep the phone number (or domain name) active under your name. Depending on what you use the phone (or domain) for, additional costs can arise, but (whether these are paid or not) they do not affect your rights to the phone number (or domain name). In both cases, there is a central authority that grants you rights to the phone number (or domain name) under certain conditions and subject to payment of the basic fees. I would argue that the ultimate ownership lies with that authority, although they delegate most of those rights to you for a limited period. Depending on the phone company (or registrar) fees will vary, and are subject to change. The "ownership" of the right to register a domain for you varies according to the top level of the domain name and rules determined by a central naming authority (IANA). Those with control of the top level domains, in turn, can determine rules for registration of sub domains. Those with ownership of the rights to some top level domains can (and do) charge extortionate fees for allowing you to register selected names under that .tld, and are able (with little recourse on your part) to demand unreasonable amounts of money for you to retain your rights to your domain name. These costs have nothing to do with engineering running costs, but are a straight money grab.