Masked email

[misc]

Works with both Chrome and Firefox for me. Strange thing…

[ewal]

Originally Posted by misc

Works with both Chrome and Firefox for me. Strange thing…

Thanks for trying all of this out. Yes indeed strange thing. Not really a big issue as aliasing works just fine.

On the gmail dot issue raised in this thread. I have a gmail account which is simply my name concatenated with two letters (i.e. no period and in the format xxxxyy@gmail.com). Occasionally I get emails addressed to xxxx.yy@gmail.com (as google strips out the period). Surprising amount of private data gets leaked to me.

Often I get emails addressed to some guy in the USA (I'm in the UK) from his car service place. From these emails I can see the guy's, name, home address, his phone number and of course make and model of his car. Clearly his email address has been entered incorrectly by the car dealer, try as I might asking them to correct things they simply have failed to do so. I hate to think of the quality of their car servicing.

[SideshowBob]

Originally Posted by ewal

xxxxyy@gmail.com). Occasionally I get emails addressed to xxxx.yy@gmail.com (as google strips out the period). Surprising amount of private data gets leaked to me.

But this has nothing to do with the dots, or the way Google handles them.

[SideshowBob]

Originally Posted by ewal

Something like "wrong format email address" . When I removed the period dot "." it worked.

Are you sure it was a simple ASCII ".", typed from the keyboard, and not something pasted in?

[ewal]

Originally Posted by SideshowBob

Are you sure it was a simple ASCII ".", typed from the keyboard, and not something pasted in?

Hi

Yes it was a simple ASCII "." typed from the keyboard. I've now tried with Firefox, Edge and Chrome over 3 different machines. Each/every time I get "Email invalid, please try another email.".

One of life's mysteries. Never mind as I can use an domain alias.

[truemagic]

Not sure if this is the right topic to "hijack".

I just wanted to ask, is masked email with my own domain cannot be permanently deleted?

For the record I've deleted a few and I noticed they can be recovered in "Review deleted masked addresses" section. What I do not know is that the "Delete permanently" button is greyed out with a warning text = Masked addresses that have received email cannot be permanently deleted.

Now what? Note that the aliases are with my custom domain, couldn't that be vanished at will?

[misc]

AFAIK as soon as it has been in use once (received email for that alias), you cannot permanently delete a masked email address. No matter if it is under your own domain or if it’s a fastmail.com alias.

[truemagic]

Originally Posted by misc

AFAIK as soon as it has been in use once (received email for that alias), you cannot permanently delete a masked email address. No matter if it is under your own domain or if it’s a fastmail.com alias.

Ok, interesting if the same applies to FM aliases (not masked emails). Also what will happen to the deleted masked emails after I removed my domain? will they still persist in the delete list now that a restore is not feasible?

On a side note, I think we should be able to remove masked email completely if it's on our custom domain, just like any other similar services like AnonAddy or SimpleLogin.

[misc]

Originally Posted by truemagic

No matter if it is under your own domain or if it’s a fastmail.com alias.

Just for clarification: I meant no matter if it’s a masked email address under your own domain or a masekd fastmail.com email address. Real alias addresses can be deleted.

[ewal]

Just tested deleting a masked email that had already received a message. It was rejected (as expected) with following error message.

Your message wasn't delivered to xxxxxxx because the address couldn't be found or is unable to receive email.

[SideshowBob]

Originally Posted by truemagic

On a side note, I think we should be able to remove masked email completely if it's on our custom domain, just like any other similar services like AnonAddy or SimpleLogin.

Presumably, they have to keep track of them to prevent accidental reuse of a deleted address.

[TenFour]

For some reason FM keeps email addresses active forever it seems. I was an early user of FM back in the day around 2004 or so but I thought I cancelled my account around 2006 or 2007. Then a couple of years ago I paid for a new FM account for the first time in close to 15 years and I asked if my old email address was still available. It was and it started receiving email instantly from old newsletters and such that I used to get back when I had the original account. I have no idea what happened to those emails during that 15 years, but apparently the address was working all that time.

[BritTim]

Originally Posted by TenFour

For some reason FM keeps email addresses active forever it seems. I was an early user of FM back in the day around 2004 or so but I thought I cancelled my account around 2006 or 2007. Then a couple of years ago I paid for a new FM account for the first time in close to 15 years and I asked if my old email address was still available. It was and it started receiving email instantly from old newsletters and such that I used to get back when I had the original account. I have no idea what happened to those emails during that 15 years, but apparently the address was working all that time.

I suspect the emails were being silently discarded. While this is not always possible, the better email services try to silently discard messages to avoid giving potential spammers information about which email addresses are real and still active.

[TenFour]

While this is not always possible, the better email services try to silently discard messages to avoid giving potential spammers information about which email addresses are real and still active.

Wouldn't it be better to deactivate the address entirely? I wonder how many emails for inactive addresses are clogging the Internet? Old Gmail addresses that are no longer active send back a 550 message:

550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. Learn more at https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser b20-20020a0565120b9400b00498f3bdbe3asor425394lfv.25 - gsmtp

Maybe things have changed. I just tried sending to my old FM address and I got a 550 message back:
The response from the remote server was:

550 5.1.1 <emailaddress>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in virtual mailbox table

[Bamb0]

Originally Posted by TenFour

For some reason FM keeps email addresses active forever it seems

On 1 hand thats a good thing,no need of having to keep checking it to keep it alive......