Someone at BrowserStack is Leaking Users' Email Address

Like all good nerds, I generate a unique email address for every service I sign up to. This has several advantages - it allows me to see if a message is legitimately from a service, if a service is hacked the hackers can't go credential stuffing, and I instantly know who leaked my address. A few weeks ago I signed up for BrowserStack as I wanted to join their Open Source programme. I had a few…

Terence Eden’s Blog

> Like all good nerds, I generate a unique email address for every service I sign up to. This has several advantages - it allows me to see if a message is legitimately from a service, if a service is hacked the hackers can't go credential stuffing, and I instantly know who leaked my address.

I think a lot of services will "de-alias" the email addresses from these tricks to prevent alts, account spam, and to still target the "real" account holder email. So the old tricks like "<name>+<website>@<host.com>" is not considered a unique email from "<name>@<host.com>". Unless your site-specific emails are completely new inbox aliases, then I don't think this is as effective as people think it is anymore.

The way that this is done these days (and likely what the author did/does) is that you use a custom domain to receive mail; you provide an email like [email protected], and that way when service@ starts receiving spam you know exactly where it comes from
Take it a step further and do uuid@