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I wouldn't say "a few other email providers that have followed suit". As far as I know, that's always been a feature of Postfix, and common with Sendmail before
by NoGravitas 9y ago
I wouldn't say "a few other email providers that have followed suit". As far as I know, that's always been a feature of Postfix, and common with Sendmail before that. And qmail offered "-" for the same purpose (as well as providing a facility for filtering/redirecting mail based on -extensions).
- eridius 9y agoThe point is that foo+bar is a convention that many providers follow and not an actual rule of email, and therefore blocking that doesn't make sense because you'll block legitimate addresses too. Similarly, mail providers can come up with all sorts of different conventions if they want. For example, when setting up a new domain in FastMail, it offers the ability to accept anything@user.dom.ain and turn that into user+anything@dom.ain, and it offers user@anything.dom.ain which it will deliver to user@dom.ain. So here we already have two new conventions that sites can't possibly detect as alternatives to the normal foo+bar@dom.ain.
- e12e 9y agoThe standard (as in most common setup) for djb's qmail, was to accept/forward mail for <prefix>@user.example.com to user@example.com, as in: debian-list@e12e.example.com rather than debian-list+e12e@example.com. While I believe the + was common for postfix, exim and sendmail? There even was a spam-fighting scheme that used this - it took a key, and optional date, and a sender address - and generated a unique address you could give out, that was only valid for a certain time, for a certain set of senders. If the system received a mail with a from address that didn't match the cryptologically signed to-address (e12e-xjjgff65477fc@example.com) - the mail was held back, and the system generated a reply, with a signed reply-to address. A sort of manual grey-listing.