6 ms·
Hundreds? Are you sure?
by dingdongding 9y ago
Hundreds? Are you sure?
- rm_-rf_slash 9y agoI know a guy who uses a service that creates a unique email account for every service he signs up for. That way, he tells me, if he ever gets any spam, he can delete the account and it doesn't affect any of his other email accounts.
- mschuster91 9y agoWith gmail, you don't need it - foo+bar@gmail.com will end up as foo@gmail.com and you can filter by To: header.
- magoon 9y agoSpammers will never find a way around this.
- cm2187 9y agoThis is pretty useless. First because it leaks the underlying email (you can safely assume all spammers are well aware of this feature). Second because if you start receiving spam, you can't stop it. All you can do is to try to deal with the firehose. A much better solution is randomly generated aliases that you can delete.
- maccard 9y agoAnd many places block email addresses with pluses in it - for example my insurance company
- odammit 9y agoI’ve run a fair amount of email campaigns where we strip out the + if gmail is the domain to ensure it doesn’t end up in some weird filter. Dick move, I know. Tell marketing that though. I personally use gmail through a vanity domain and have a catch all rule, so I end up signing up with a fake email account for every domain (hn@mydomain.com) and then the catch all forwards it to my real account (me@mydomain.com).
- JoshTriplett 9y ago> I’ve run a fair amount of email campaigns where we strip out the + if gmail is the domain to ensure it doesn’t end up in some weird filter. At which point you should wind up in the "how widely can I advertise that you're a spammer and all your outbound email should all be routed straight to /dev/null for sending mail to an email address you were never given" filter.
- konschubert 9y agoI think that marking the mail as spam sends a signal to their email provider, putting a mark on their account?
- jsjohnst 9y agoDepends on your isp and which email provider they use. The big marketing email services generally do have the feedback loop setup with Gmail though, so yes, you are right.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> I’ve run a fair amount of email campaigns where we strip out the + if gmail is the domain to ensure it doesn’t end up in some weird filter. Which works, until the Gmail users who bother using + addresses with filters start giving all legitimate senders + addresses and sending everything thst doesn't have one and doesn't come from Google straight to deletion (possibly with a stop by “mark as spam” en route.)
- BoorishBears 9y agoThe problem is not all legitimate sites/sources will actually accept '+' as a valid email character even though the RFC says it's a valid email character.
- odammit 9y agoJinx. :D
- cortesoft 9y agoYeah, you do realize spammers know that, too? They will just strip part after the +
- mschuster91 9y agoOf course I do. But most don't bother, and it still works today.
- lttlrck 9y agoIt also works with foo.bar which is a little harder to filter.
- everly 9y agoWell, not exactly. That would only work if your address was registered as foobar@gmail.com but not if it was registered as foo@gmail.com. Essentially, periods don't matter in gmail addresses. Adding a . in between any of the characters (or removing, if you registered the account to have .'s included) will still go to the same email address. But you can't add .anystring to your address and still receive the message as you can with +anystring. This always blows the mind of the average gmail user who thinks they registered first.last@gmail.com when they find out that firstlast@gmail.com also works.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 9y agoIt really baffles me that people are still suggesting this as advice for spam reduction. All it takes is a third of a brain and a couple seconds of thought to realize that spammers know this is a thing and can adapt.
- glandium 9y agoThey can, but in practice, they don't.
- throwaway613834 9y ago> They can, but in practice, they don't. And you're confident of this how? I'm not actually convinced this is true. It's definitely a widespread belief though.
- glandium 9y agoBecause I'm using the + thing, and I'm still receiving spam to the +ed addresses.
- throwaway613834 9y agoWeird, I've done that for a long time too and hardly any received spam to those at all. Good to know though, thanks.
- darrenf 9y agoIndependent of the concept's wisdom or implementation, Yahoo! introduced disposable addresses (originally marketed as 'Address Guard') back in 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20031023014724/http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/031021/215458_1.html http://web.archive.org/web/20031023014724/http://biz.yahoo.c...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- notirish 9y agotell him 'bout mailinator
- throw_away 9y agoThis can be done easily if you own a domain and use a service that lets you specify a catch-all address. I do this with my own domain and G Suite. Then, you don't even need to do any preparation before giving out the address. It does sound weird to the person writing it down and I've had more than one person say something like "well, if you're just going to give me a fake address, then don't bother" before I explained myself. One other down side is that it is not as easy to reply to mail as the other, generated identity (in gsuite, you need to create a new account in the domain to write as that username and also maybe jump through a hoop or two). Replying casually can often reveal your main identity, which is often the one you are trying to strongly protect.
- mixmastamyk 9y agoThunderbird has the virtual identity plugin for this.
- jsjohnst 9y agoGo into Gmail settings and add aliases there for each “account” you want to add to the catch-all. Actual separate accounts costs you $5+/month each. (I do similar on my domains and the Gmail alias is easier to do than logging into Admin CP and adding aliases there)
- postila 9y ago+1. I also use *@mydomain.com feature in G Suite, and it's very convenient to understand which companies sell/pass email databases to others w/o my permission. In some cases, you need to reply from that "aliased" address -- in this case, I do go to the Settings, add an alias, got a confirmation code, and confirm it. Then this new "address" is available in GMail in drop-down "From:" menu when you write a new email. username+anything@mydomain.com is also a useful feature (as well as u.s.er.nam.e@mydomain.com – dots are all ignored in GMail; some services don't allow "+" in email address field, so you can use finite number of variants with "."). These little tricks make GMail convenient for geeks :)
- scarface74 9y agoWith gmail, you don't need it - foo+bar@gmail.com will end up as foo@gmail.com and you can filter by To: header. I’m sure spammers have already figured that out.
- BoorishBears 9y agoAnd spam filters
- maw 9y agoLots of programmers haven't, though. I get addresses rejected as invalid when signing up for some service at least once a month.
- deathanatos 9y agoI've seen programmers get overruled by "product managers" in regards to handling email as it is intended to be handled.
- baddox 9y agoMy favorite is one site I encountered that let you create and login with such an email address, but the forgot password form couldn’t handle it and would 500.
- dx034 9y agoA lot of services don't allow + in email addresses. With gmail you can also insert a . anywhere you like which works more often. But sometimes, catch all addresses really help to test.
- igravious 9y agoWhat standard is foo+bar@test.com a part of?
- zimpenfish 9y agoI don't think there's a standard which says that "X+Y delivers to X" - it's a configurable option in exim and you could equally well make it "XqY delivers to X" if you were wilfully perverse.
- jsjohnst 9y agoYes, positive. They were test accounts, but still in the production namespace.