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How many legitimate emails have a + in them and don't use such an alias system? I'm sure they exist, but are probably even less frequent than the amount of peop
by Nextgrid 3y ago
How many legitimate emails have a + in them and don't use such an alias system? I'm sure they exist, but are probably even less frequent than the amount of people using this alias system, thus it's more profitable to strip it out.
- legitster 3y agoWhat do you mean by "profitable"? If you are just trying to datamine for random email addresses, you can do that with a random string generator. If you want a list of Netflix customers accounts, you probably want the same exact email they signed up with. Besides, you can always make a Gmail rule to junk any emails coming in without a modifier.
- Nextgrid 3y agoProfitable, whether for the company itself or for some oxygen waster to get some metric ("engagement"?) that justifies their salary/promotion. I'm not saying they will strip out the + from the primary email address used for login/etc - that would be dangerous for many reasons and could deny access to users. But they are absolutely likely to strip it out for obnoxious behavior which is only valuable at scale and individual failures don't matter - such as ad targeting, email spam, etc. In this case, it doesn't matter if you fail to spam the 0.001% of users with + as part of their actual username if it means you manage to spam the 2% that use + as an alias separator.
- legitster 3y agoMy career is to build and maintain marketing email systems. So just from my professional advice, it's still a legitimate hack. I'm not saying there is not someone out there trying these shenanigans, but in 95%+ of situations you are still going to catch people sharing your data with a + modifier.