@navi I do that by simply having shitloads of ska-whateverXXXXXX@skarnet.org addresses going to various mailboxes, and if I get spammed I know exactly what site sold my data (and deactivate the address)

Of course that supposes running your own MTA but I thought you were already doing that?

@navi definitelynotnavi+subthing@vlhl.dev?

Edit: oh, you don't want to pollute your domain. IME random sites don't care about the domain because the people who have their own domain are 5 nerds in the world like you and me, and 95% of the site's customers are @gmail.com. So don't worry about it.

@ska yeah but imagine subthing@never.heardof.vlhldev.com /hj

i guess it’s just a namespacing thing, emails to my domain are mapped to unix users (minus the like handful of aliases) and i’d feel icky adding random prefixes

but, i won’t ever have a user named definitelynotnavi so, ig that’s fine

@navi I registered the whatisthebestprogramminglanguage.info domain at some point and intend to keep it because it's useful for helping me test various things like virtual hosting, so if you want mail aliases on it, I can set forwards for you 😉

@navi yeah if you're using the /etc/passwd users it makes sense that you don't want to pollute it.

My stuff is all aliases and mailboxes have no relationship to system users, so I can afford adding random mailboxes left and right.

@navi
Why not simply a subdomain (e.g.: anything@subdomain.vlhl.dev), or even a wildcard MX on a subdomain?
You can easily redirect it to your main (or possibly an alternate, e g. more strictly filtered) mailbox/alias?
You could "declare" (i.e. register on random web services) base+ext@sub.yourdomain.name while actually redirecting all of `*@sub.yourdomain.name` to your dedicated alias, and possibly having a sieve (or anything else) script process and deal with your various "base" and "ext"