6 ms·
It's not much better than "Your.Full.Name+company@example.com" in practice tho.
by philipwhiuk 4y ago
It's not much better than "Your.Full.Name+company@example.com" in practice tho.
- samschooler 4y agoI'd say its one level beyond. Since "+" is so widely used, as talked about in the article, its trivial to remove. However with a non-standard domain and inconsistent username its not as easy to remove. These are some of the formats I use, they all offer exactly what I need (uniqueness, hard to programmatically attach to another, and culpability): lyft@account.example.com liftcarshare@example.com email@lyft.com.example.com example.com@com.lyft.example.com
- anonporridge 4y agoI would personally go one level further. Generate random email addresses so you can't easily guess what others I might have given out. Then keep track of the mapping. A service like simplelogin.io makes this easy.
- ZetaZero 4y agoFastMail does something like this. Their Masked Emails are two random words plus a four digit number.
- caust1c 4y agoBeen using this feature since they introduced it and can say that I'm very pleased with it so far in combination with it's 1password integration. When creating an account somewhere, fastmail automatically generates a new email for the site via an API in one click. Highly recommend.
- bosie 4y agoicloud and also fastmail do this for you
- sereguze 4y agoWhat about base58 encoding their company name.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoCaesar cypher.
- turboponyy 4y agoWhat I usually do is servicename + 6 to 10 random numbers. This way I can see the intended recipient whilst avoiding people being able to check where I've signed up.
- t_mann 4y agoWhy not use the numbers to encode the creation date?
- turboponyy 4y agoYou certainly could, though I don't particularly care about the creation date - additionally, this is something that I can do easily by hand. E: Ah, I didn't see the schema one of the parent commenters suggested - your question makes a lot more sense now. I still don't really care about the creation date, though, but I do care about the email having a random component, since if someone were to figure out my naming schema, they could check whether I've signed up for any given service.
- t_mann 4y agoGreat idea with the subdomain! May I ask how you do it? Also, one idea for you: how about using created20220621@company.example.com?
- samschooler 4y agoFastmail allows for wildcat (J)IMAP addresses. It a *.example.com MAIL record in dns with a supported (J)IMAP server.
- pandemicsoul 4y agoLots of company don't allow you to enter the + symbol in their signup field.
- anonymousiam 4y agoI do this too, and lots of companies also don't allow you to use THEIR company name in the email address that you give them. Sometimes their front-end is not aware of this restriction and will let you register, but then you'll have unresolvable issues. I've spent some time on tech support phone calls with companies that have this issue. Occasionally a company will implement blocking their own name in a user-provided email after the user is already registered. I've had this happen a few times too. Suddenly the account will disappear without explanation.
- forgotpwd16 4y agoA spammer can just filter the +company bit out.
- prash_ant 4y agoYes, but the fraction of users using the +company part would be similar to the fraction of linux desktop users on the internet. The way we don't see most software companies supporting linux desktop users simply because it is not profitable, we can hypothesize that the spammers won't spend time-energy-money on getting the +company filtered out.
- remram 4y agoThis is common enough that many sign-up forms reject the +. Spammers can definitely do that much.
- indymike 4y agoRemoving the +company is not cool. When I give you myname+yourcompany@mydomain.something, I'm authorizing you to mail to that address, not myname@mydomain.something. If you don't respect the recipient, you'll be rewarded with unsubscribes, at best, and spam reports at worst.
- core-utility 4y agoBut we're talking about the same companies who will sell your data for a fraction of a cent. I don't think they care about being "not cool"
- paulryanrogers 4y agoIME some may accept the plus address at sign up then break it at sign in or substitute for another character. A major US insurance company did this, which could have allowed hijacking if one had registered the address with the plus replaced with their substitute character.