alt Hacker NewsI do this. The awkward thing is when I am in person or on the phone and have to explain that my customer email address is [their_business_name]@my_weird_domain.tld
But the people usually just nod along.
The other downside is that it's forward-in only, wish I could proxy responses without setting up a whole new inbox (and outbox).
Replies
Just happened to me today! I was at the Verizon store and my address was verizon@... Sometimes it leads to confusion, but sometimes it leads to getting extra special treatment actually! They think I'm someone important.
They act as if I discovered fire when I give them a plussed address.
Its not the worst.
I was once on the phone with german insurance provider and they dictateted me email to send documents to: [email protected]
I dont speak German so it was both tough and funny EuroTrip-like moment.
Yes its really email they use.
You can proxy responses with a ton of e-mail clients, even Gmail supports it once you verify you can get a message sent to that address.
sometimes I'm lazy and I just have it as [email protected] or [email protected] and they get quite puzzled
So I guess I'll take a moment and plug my email provider, Fastmail. Their integration with 1Password to enable creation of Masked Email at account creation time is really fantastic! I have several hundred of these at this point, it's made my digital life appreciably better.
But to the point of forward-in-only -- I use the fastmail web client and iOS client. Both of these respond using the Masked Email address if you choose to respond to an email. In fact I can choose any of my masked email addressed as I am composing mail to initial communication from that address.
In short, "it just works". I really can't say enough good things about Fastmail!
> The only awkward thing is when I am in person or on the phone and have to explain that my customer email address
I had one small business aggressively threaten me that they fully owned their business name and I wasn't allowed to use it in my email address.
My solution was to keep my wonderful aliases and dump them. If a business is concerned but nice about it I'll offer an alternative such as plumber@
> The other downside is that it's forward-in only, wish I could proxy responses without setting up a whole new inbox (and outbox).
If you have your own domain most mail providers don't care what username@ you use on your sent mail so you shouldn't need any additional mailboxes (especially if they already offer inbound catch all)
I also use the ReplayAsOriginalRecipientUp [1] extension in Thunderbird which takes the recipient address and puts it as the sender for ongoing communication.
[1]: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/reply...