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There is one thing you are forgetting, and that is working with data at scale. That is not to say it is not solvable, but it requires more thought than just shi

There is one thing you are forgetting, and that is working with data at scale. That is not to say it is not solvable, but it requires more thought than just shitting it out in an afternoon. Gmail as the receiving MTA will want to accept or reject a given email recipient. To do this they need to look up the information. They likely have a fancy distributed way of doing this now. If each user now exploded out to N aliases, you are likely adding a new network hop and loads more memory storage before the MTA can accept/reject. When you are processing many billions of email (lookups), this is a significant change. Again, it is solvable if they wanted to do it. But it is nontrivial. Add onto this the need for the product team prioritize the work, other work to be de-prioritized, planning, testing, etc.

logicallee 10y ago
You might have missed that Google already does this. They literally already do this with the + markers. Literally all that is necessary is for the user to be allowed to add an entry saying kasdlfj33sdfsketchy = johnsmith23+sketchy so that the user can give out "kasdlfj33sdfsketchy@gmail.com" rather than "johnsmith23+sketchy@gmail.com" as the user can do today. Nothing that you have stated is difficult or a choice, because johnsmith23+sketchy is live today. If you have a gmail account, you can give out your accountname + marker to anyone you want, so that later you can start filtering it. This is security by obscurity, since this can be removed by a regex. I would like them to fix this. As for your other point, where you call the extra data "nontrivial", I am afraid you are wrong, it is almost the definition of trivial. If you have a gmail account, go to it and type a name or any word into the search field. You will instantly receive search results from the entire history of your email archives. That is because your email archives are fully indexed for fast searching. This takes a not-insignificant amount of space. Adding a few bytes of aliases is absolutely trivial compared to the amount of storage and lookup that Gmail does on your behalf. It's almost the definition of trivial. This isn't 1964!

logicallee 10y ago

You might have missed that Google already does this. They literally already do this with the + markers. Literally all that is necessary is for the user to be allowed to add an entry saying kasdlfj33sdfsketchy = johnsmith23+sketchy so that the user can give out "kasdlfj33sdfsketchy@gmail.com" rather than "johnsmith23+sketchy@gmail.com" as the user can do today. Nothing that you have stated is difficult or a choice, because johnsmith23+sketchy is live today. If you have a gmail account, you can give out your accountname + marker to anyone you want, so that later you can start filtering it. This is security by obscurity, since this can be removed by a regex. I would like them to fix this. As for your other point, where you call the extra data "nontrivial", I am afraid you are wrong, it is almost the definition of trivial. If you have a gmail account, go to it and type a name or any word into the search field. You will instantly receive search results from the entire history of your email archives. That is because your email archives are fully indexed for fast searching. This takes a not-insignificant amount of space. Adding a few bytes of aliases is absolutely trivial compared to the amount of storage and lookup that Gmail does on your behalf. It's almost the definition of trivial. This isn't 1964!