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You can use the + trick and . trick with Gmail addresses too. I think Outlook as well supports the + trick. The only downside to this is that there are plenty o
by 27182818284 7y ago
You can use the + trick and . trick with Gmail addresses too. I think Outlook as well supports the + trick. The only downside to this is that there are plenty of sites that don't accept a + either knowingly or unknowingly.
- StavrosK 7y agoYeah, that's why Fastmail has that syntax.
- jacobolus 7y agoThe + feature long predates gmail. Here’s an example description from the 1990s http://www.faqs.org/faqs/mail/addressing/index.html http://www.faqs.org/faqs/mail/addressing/index.html
- StavrosK 7y agoYes, it's in the SMTP RFC.
- megous 7y agoIt's not.
- StavrosK 7y agoSee the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20109564
- megous 7y agoRFCs don't define any meaning to '+' as described in this thread, except that local part of the address should be interpreted locally (usually by MDA), and preserved unmodified during message transfer. There's no + aliasing in the specs. There's no interpretation defined for local part of email address.
- StavrosK 7y agoOh, yes. I meant "+" is an acceptable character to use in the local part of an email address, as per the RFC. I see now where the misunderstanding lies.
- mjlee 7y agoTo clarify the SMTP RFC (RFC 5321) says that a valid e-mail address is defined in RFC 5322 - Internet Message Format. RFC 5322 does say that a `+` is a valid character in the local part of an e-mail address. The `+` character being used for address aliasing is, as far as I can tell, not mentioned in RFC 5321 or RFC 5322
- jcheng 7y agoIt's apparently a thing now: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233
- perennate 7y agoI think StavrosK meant Fastmail has the service@user.yourdomain.com syntax because "there are plenty of sites that don't accept a +", not because Gmail supports the user+service@gmail.com syntax.
- StavrosK 7y agoThat's what I meant, sorry and thank you.
- jiveturkey 7y agothis isn't a good anti-spam filter though. + addressing (even the fastmail kind) is trivial to parse and I'm 100% sure email harvesters are aware of it.
- techbio 7y agoThis isn’t to prevent spam, it is to identify the original leak. If the unique email address you gave to company X is used for solicitations by company Y, company X must have given it away.
- mikedelfino 7y agoThen what?
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y agoIf you live in Europe, you might have a case.
- Xylakant 7y agoI usually go for <company>@example.com where <company> is the company I’m handing my address to. After a breach I route that address to /dev/null
- erichurkman 7y agoAfter a breach of <company>@example.com, forward it to support@<company.com>.
- Xylakant 7y agoDon’t give me ideas.
- bradknowles 7y agoThat's trivially easy to guess -- and game. You want something that is sufficiently random that it can't be easily guessed or gamed, but can be quickly and easily determined on your side. Salted cryptographic hashes might be a good place to start.
- djsumdog 7y agoI think most MTAs support +. Isn't that part of the e-mail standard?
- jperras 7y agoIt is, but many services will (incorrectly) prevent an address with a `+` in it from ever making it to their database/whatever. So the fact that the MTA will route it is irrelevant if it never makes it to the MTA in the first place.
- deathanatos 7y ago> It is [part of the standard] + as a magic character to effect routing isn't part of the standard. Mail servers are free to route addresses to mailboxes in whatever manner they see fit. That + can appear as a character in an address is part of the standard, just not the behavior of it; a server that treats a+1@ and a+2@ as distinct emails is conforming, and from a sending side, you cannot know if a+1@ and a+2@ will end up in the same mailbox. (But you're absolutely right that too many sites fail to parse email addresses. Or rather, they over-parse.)
- FireBeyond 7y agoThe MTAs do. Many a website won't allow you to use this syntax for a user registration.
- zarify 7y agoI've been doing this for years with Gmail but the issue with breach notification services like HIBP / Monitor is that you can't add wildcards into your search for notifications, so unless I plug in every me+service@domain email variant in, I could be missing being notified.
- stunt 7y agoFastmail way of doing it is better. Some advertisers are already removing + syntax from Gmail addresses.