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I provide my email address with the +companyname suffix on the local part as a way to filter my email into various folders based on the To header contents. Unf
by u801e 5y ago
I provide my email address with the +companyname suffix on the local part as a way to filter my email into various folders based on the To header contents.
Unfortunately, many websites are configured to reject email addresses that contain a plus character. I've also encountered websites in the past that did accept the + character when creating the account where the email address serves as the user name, but then could not log in because their log in form rejected the + character in the user name.
- fullstop 5y agoAges ago, back in myspace days, their system would permit + when creating an account, but could not handle this in their forgot password / password reset system. I never was able to delete my account because of this.
- inopinatus 5y agoSony's SEN used to have an account creation page that would permit +, but subsequent sign-in interpreted it as a URL-encoded whitespace. No login for you
- ezekg 5y agolol you should have tried to enter a URL-encoded plus sign, %2B.
- torstenvl 5y agoAll social media accounts are delectable on a long enough timescale.
- fullstop 5y agoAs it happens, it was eventually done for me: https://mashable.com/article/myspace-data-loss/ https://mashable.com/article/myspace-data-loss/
- innocenat 5y agoI find that a lot of website don't allow + sign precisely because of Gmail usage.
- vidarh 5y agoIf you use Gmail here's a fallback option: Gmail ignores "." in the local part. So foo.bar is the same as f.ooba.r to Gmail. Obviously quite limited and more hassle to keep track of.
- caymanjim 5y agoOne of my primary pet peeves with Gmail. It leads to a lot more junk mail arriving in my inbox. My real Gmail address is 'first.m.last', and almost all the spam I get is addressed to 'firstmlast'. Gmail is great at filtering out spam so that I don't see most of it, but if not for their unconventional filtering of recipients, I'd get even less. I also get a lot of email from idiots who don't know their own address and provide mine instead, and literally all of that would bounce without their . handling.
- ben509 5y agoSame here. I send everything that is firstlast@gmail straight to junk. > I also get a lot of email from idiots who don't know their own address Holy crap there are a lot of them. I've got one bank sending me the dude's statements. He's also been on some interesting trips, seen all his hotel stays, etc.
- brewdad 5y agoSame. I don't have a very common name but there are at least two other people who share it. One has used my GMail address to apply for jobs and for his unemployment benefits. I'm guessing he isn't having much luck with either one. The other finally figured it out but his wife still hasn't after more than a decade. It gets really old receiving reminders to service a vehicle I've never owned from a dealership 2000 miles away among other similar crap.
- judge2020 5y agoI thought it would be nice to have my name without numbers as my gmail, but with all the stories i've heard, I think i'm glad I have the numbers now.
- 5y ago
- moojd 5y agoI was unable to provide my email address for a retail rewards program last week because the input field for the domain was a dropdown in their POS. Not the TLD, the entire part of the email after '@'!
- StavrosK 5y agoJeez, wow. How many domains were in that box?
- bassdropvroom 5y ago"There are other emails besides gmail and hotmail? Woah!" - the person who thought that was a good idea, probably.
- sellyme 5y agoThere is absolutely no way that someone who thought building a dropdown for email domain name is a good idea wasn't putting AOL and Yahoo! as the first two options.
- jacobkg 5y agoYes this is terrible. On the other hand, if your goal is to prevent people from signing up using disposable domains, the blacklist approach (which I have tried before) is a never ending game of whack a mole. Sounds like this was in person at store though which is extra weird because seems unlikely that scammers would be trying to sign up en masse at a physical location (unlike if the form is connected to the internet)
- skhr0680 5y agoUntil about a decade ago, this was extremely common in Japan. RIP mobile email, another victim of smartphones in general and the iPhone in particular
- theshrike79 5y agoFastmail allows for companyname@youraccount.fastmail.com -style addresses. Even for your own domains. Much more reliable than the + -thing, which breaks in the weirdest of places.
- aidenn0 5y agoI've been using fastmail for years and didn't know that. Thanks!
- theandrewbailey 5y agoI use Fastmail with my own domain name and unlimited email inboxes, so I use companyname@mydomain.com to sort incoming mail.
- jetpackjoe 5y agoI do the same thing and believe it or not I’ve seen websites reject emails with their own name in the email.
- Semaphor 5y agoI recently got a letter from a companies' law department and had to explain the whole thing :D
- hateful 5y agoI had one do that. When I give the address in person I get "do you work here?" I had to switch my hosting provider at one point because they stopped supporting catch-all. I have no idea how many "addresses" I've used, since I don't create a specific email for each, so I had to get new hosting (note: this was over 10 years ago)
- ThalesX 5y agoI used this wonderful trick to sign up for my government issued eID (it was something else but works for explaining). What they decided to do is to simply remove the + and don’t let me know about it. my_email+service@foo.bar thus became my_emailservice@foo.bar I tried logging in, resetting passwords, nothing worked. I had to go to the authorities and make a written request to allow them to interrogate the database by the equivalent of my social security number, and that’s when we realized they just stripped the +.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y agoI got sick of companies rejecting email with "+", and bought a domain to use for email (among other reasons). Now I've got a wildcard entry in DNS, so any valid local part gets routed to my inbox. So instead of "username+company@example.com" I can do "company@example.com".
- richardwhiuk 5y agoThat causes weird behaviour in places, where they assume the bit before the @ is a "username".
- 8ytecoder 5y agoI've been using an own domain with wildcard emails for many years now. I'm yet to encounter a single scenario of inferred names.
- choward 5y agoI've been using this strategy for years and have not encountered that issue before. That would mean the part before the @ would have to be unique across all domains. That doesn't make any sense. You couldn't have webmaster@domain1.com and webmaster@domain2.com registered for example.
- CydeWeys 5y agoOr ben@gmail.com and ben@hotmail.com couldn't both be registered. This scheme is so obviously flawed I can't imagine it's widely implemented.
- MivLives 5y agoWhat provider do you use for email? That does sound nice.
- tstrimple 5y agoI've tried something similar with Fastmail, and it works out well for the most part. I have ran into more than a couple services which won't accept email addresses not on a whitelisted domain for some reason and I had to use an @gmail.com address which forwards to my domain.
- caymanjim 5y agoI got sick of + not being accepted and switched to using - for all my aliases, which works everywhere I've tried. It's annoying, but practical (assuming you run your own mail server, or have the ability to manage it client-side).
- 8ytecoder 5y agoPlenty of hosted solutions support wildcard - including GSuite and Fastmail.
- jbgreer 5y agoDitto, with the same hassles mentioned by you and others, such that I'm actively looking at email services that handle this sort of thing better using approaches such as mentioned below - domain@mydomain style registration addresses.
- agustif 5y agoYou can have unlimited handles with fastmail if you're looking for that
- rpadovani 5y agoI use a catch-all to have a <website>@<mydomain>.com login for every website. Samsung doesn't accept emails with "samsung" as prefix, so I have samsun@mydomain.com for them. I have no idea what's the logic behind.
- kccqzy 5y agoI use reverse DNS notation for the local part. So that would be "com.samsung@mydomain.com" in my case.