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There's a line in the Zen of Python: "practicality beats purity". If I can avoid someone filing a bug or a support request by knowing that Gmail has trained peo

There's a line in the Zen of Python: "practicality beats purity". If I can avoid someone filing a bug or a support request by knowing that Gmail has trained people to believe a bunch of distinct (according to RFC) mailboxes actually aren't distinct, I'm going to avoid the support request. The -- by comparison -- minuscule set of users who A) actually understand the relevant specs and B) care enough to yell at me in an HN comment are going to lose that battle every time.

fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
> Gmail has trained people to believe a bunch of distinct (according to RFC) mailboxes actually aren't distinct I'd be fairly surprised if your average user of gmail knew this: I know it and I use it in part because it lets me _distinguish_ different accounts on the same site. Second-guessing someone who's taking advantage of this feature is more likely to generate tech support requests than not.
- zbentley 9y ago
  Knowledge of the plus trick has gotten pretty widespread. Anecdotally, I know a lot of non-technical people that use a single +spam address to route to a spam folder. Non-anecdotally, articles with large numbers of views/comments about the trick can be found with a quick Google search on non-techie sites like NYT/HuffPost/BusinessInsider/Buzzfeed/Pinterest/etc. Not that those are definitive, but I think knowledge of this is more widespread than you think.
notriddle 9y ago
If you know about gmail plus and dot addressing, and use it for verifying uniqueness, then I'll understand. I'll also probably just use mailinator to make the second and third accounts anyway, but whatever. If you actually strip the dots and plusses from my email, and start sending stuff to my main address, then I will mark your messages as spam. You need to store the normalized and non-normalized versions of the address. Actually, you need to do this for normalizing on usernames anyway, to make sure you don't mutilate people's Arabic names or anything (Unicode-normalized cursive looks really bad; you need to preserve the original version, while keeping the normalized version around specifically for uniqueness checking).
smichel17 9y ago
Without questioning this line of thought, it seems like deduplicating by lowercasing and perhaps removing dots is a good choice, but stripping +suffixes seems likely to generate more user annoyance than it prevents. If I filter based on those suffixes and you send me mail and strip the suffix, I'm going to be pissed.

fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago

> Gmail has trained people to believe a bunch of distinct (according to RFC) mailboxes actually aren't distinct I'd be fairly surprised if your average user of gmail knew this: I know it and I use it in part because it lets me _distinguish_ different accounts on the same site. Second-guessing someone who's taking advantage of this feature is more likely to generate tech support requests than not.

zbentley 9y ago
Knowledge of the plus trick has gotten pretty widespread. Anecdotally, I know a lot of non-technical people that use a single +spam address to route to a spam folder. Non-anecdotally, articles with large numbers of views/comments about the trick can be found with a quick Google search on non-techie sites like NYT/HuffPost/BusinessInsider/Buzzfeed/Pinterest/etc. Not that those are definitive, but I think knowledge of this is more widespread than you think.

notriddle 9y ago

If you know about gmail plus and dot addressing, and use it for verifying uniqueness, then I'll understand. I'll also probably just use mailinator to make the second and third accounts anyway, but whatever. If you actually strip the dots and plusses from my email, and start sending stuff to my main address, then I will mark your messages as spam. You need to store the normalized and non-normalized versions of the address. Actually, you need to do this for normalizing on usernames anyway, to make sure you don't mutilate people's Arabic names or anything (Unicode-normalized cursive looks really bad; you need to preserve the original version, while keeping the normalized version around specifically for uniqueness checking).

smichel17 9y ago

Without questioning this line of thought, it seems like deduplicating by lowercasing and perhaps removing dots is a good choice, but stripping +suffixes seems likely to generate more user annoyance than it prevents. If I filter based on those suffixes and you send me mail and strip the suffix, I'm going to be pissed.