3 ms·

Given how well known user+site@gmail.com is wouldn't many sites simply strip the +... part before selling the email data?

matte_black 8y ago
Yes, this is part of standard data cleaning practices. You always remove whatever custom formats a provider allows to get the raw minimum email address (this is only for export, you still send official communication with a user to their original specified address).
- nybble41 8y ago
  There's a simple solution for that: always include a label as part of your address, and treat any mail that doesn't include one as spam.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    Not every service even allows you to have a label in your email address. So what then?
    - nybble41 8y ago
      Get them to fix their broken systems? The concept of a "label" exists only in the user agent. To everyone else the '+' character is just part of the account identifier, and a perfectly valid element of any e-mail address. The entire portion before the '@' sign is potentially significant. If someone hands you an address abc+def@example.com, there is no guarantee whatsoever that mail sent to abc@example.com will end up in the same individual's inbox—that could be a completely unrelated account. On the e-mail provider's side, one way to work around such broken systems would be to let users generate random, opaque aliases which do not contain their primary e-mail username but route to the same account, with a predetermined label applied on receipt. These would look just like ordinary addresses and there would be no way for services to strip out the identifying elements.
ghostly_s 8y ago
Why would they care enough to do so?
- devocracy 8y ago
  If I get a marked as spam notification, I'll strip anything after the '+' (and really any special characters that distract from the raw email address) to make sure I never send an email to the address again.
jzl 8y ago
There is one surprisingly good feature in yahoo mail that I wish google would provide: the ability (requirement, actually) to create a custom prefix for disposable email addresses. Just pick something completely unrelated to your real username. You can only create it once and it is forever your prefix, so don't mess up this step! Also, unlike gmail, you have to register a suffix when you want a new address in the form of prefix-suffix@yahoo.com. But this has the added benefit that you can delete any of the suffixes from the list, thereby stopping incoming messages from that address. You can have up to 500 active suffixes. Finally, since the format uses a dash rather than +, I have never once had a disposable yahoo address rejected. Not sure if that made any sense, but here's a link to the docs: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN28338.html https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN28338.html
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

matte_black 8y ago

Yes, this is part of standard data cleaning practices. You always remove whatever custom formats a provider allows to get the raw minimum email address (this is only for export, you still send official communication with a user to their original specified address).

nybble41 8y ago
There's a simple solution for that: always include a label as part of your address, and treat any mail that doesn't include one as spam.
- matte_black 8y ago
  Not every service even allows you to have a label in your email address. So what then?
  - nybble41 8y ago
    Get them to fix their broken systems? The concept of a "label" exists only in the user agent. To everyone else the '+' character is just part of the account identifier, and a perfectly valid element of any e-mail address. The entire portion before the '@' sign is potentially significant. If someone hands you an address abc+def@example.com, there is no guarantee whatsoever that mail sent to abc@example.com will end up in the same individual's inbox—that could be a completely unrelated account. On the e-mail provider's side, one way to work around such broken systems would be to let users generate random, opaque aliases which do not contain their primary e-mail username but route to the same account, with a predetermined label applied on receipt. These would look just like ordinary addresses and there would be no way for services to strip out the identifying elements.

ghostly_s 8y ago

Why would they care enough to do so?

devocracy 8y ago
If I get a marked as spam notification, I'll strip anything after the '+' (and really any special characters that distract from the raw email address) to make sure I never send an email to the address again.

jzl 8y ago

There is one surprisingly good feature in yahoo mail that I wish google would provide: the ability (requirement, actually) to create a custom prefix for disposable email addresses. Just pick something completely unrelated to your real username. You can only create it once and it is forever your prefix, so don't mess up this step! Also, unlike gmail, you have to register a suffix when you want a new address in the form of prefix-suffix@yahoo.com. But this has the added benefit that you can delete any of the suffixes from the list, thereby stopping incoming messages from that address. You can have up to 500 active suffixes. Finally, since the format uses a dash rather than +, I have never once had a disposable yahoo address rejected. Not sure if that made any sense, but here's a link to the docs: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN28338.html https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN28338.html

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]