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Speaking of which, this alias system from google is great in theory, but kind of pointless in practice; spammers can easily figure out they can just remove ever
by Mahn 14y ago
Speaking of which, this alias system from google is great in theory, but kind of pointless in practice; spammers can easily figure out they can just remove everything from the + sign, including the sign itself, and boom, they have my address without the specific alias.
- yid 14y agoIt's not from Google; it's called subaddressing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags
- jaibot 14y agoIt's pointless in practice in theory; in practice in practice spammers (in my experience) don't target + aliases. And if you think about the set of people who are likely to give money to spammers, the set of people using + aliases, and the fraction of + alias space that is occupied versus the fraction of non-+'aliased space that is occupied, the reason why becomes clear.
- pfranz 14y agoI've tried to use this system in the past, but found it to be a PITA. A lot of email systems won't let you use a +. The other gotcha I get is that they use the email address as a login token (Dropbox, for example). So you have to remember a) that you used a token and b) what it was. Any suggestions on approaching these?
- chmars 14y agoI use domaincom@mydomain.com, e.g., dropboxcom@mydomain.com.
- bigiain 14y ago1Password (or equivalent). Even though a service might desperately want to know my personal and/or business email address, and disguise that desire with the usual "Hey, just use your email address as your login username!", doesn't mean I have to comply. Unless they're prepared to accept responsibility to disclosure of my address, I feel perfectly happy taking the required measures to minimise those risks myself - no matter what they attempt to enforce with crappy email validation or ToS requirements. (And, although Dropbox have finally arrived in their forum-thread ~24hrs late apologising for their "community moderators" calling their customers idiots, the responses from Nathan and especially Chris only strengthen my resolve to ignore any attempt by companies/services to gain access to my personal email addresses as part of their user databases.)
- __david__ 14y agoI always use the domain-name minus the top level for my token. So if my base email were "david@example.com", for "dropbox.com" it would be david+dropbox@example.com. That makes it very easy to figure out all the emails I might have (since I'm essentially just remembering an very simple algorithm to generate them). Very often sites have sucky email validation that rejects "+" so I configured my system to allow . and _ to also work the same way. That way I can choose david.dropbox@example.com or david_dropbox@example.com if the + doesn't work.
- itsybitsycoder 14y agoI once ran into the problem where a retail site forced me to sign up before paying, then refused to accept Paypal payment from any address except the one I signed up with. Of course my Paypal wasn't myemail+retailsite@gmail.com. Very annoying.
- greenmountin 14y agoThat's true for a negative filter, but not a positive one; although, an email that required the subaddress might be less universal.
- rhizome 14y agospammers can easily figure out they can just remove everything from the + sign, including the sign itself, and boom, they have my address without the specific alias. Do they in fact do this?
- numbsafari 14y agoYep. I know for a fact they do. Yahoo! Plus has a much better system where you use a different base email address plus the sub-address rather than your regular address. For example, if my account is "somebody@gmail.com" then you use somebody+dropbox@gmail.com. But with yahoo, you pick an alternate, e.g. "huggybear", and use that instead (huggybear-dropbox@yahoo.com). That way if a spammer seems the sub-addressed account, they can't send email to huggybear@yahoo.com unless they want to end up on Yahoo's blacklist. I've had a great deal more success with Yahoo's sub-addressing than Google's.
- Mahn 14y agoThat's perfect, I wish you could do something like this in gmail without specifically creating a new account for every alias.
- numbsafari 14y agoI should clarify: with Yahoo plus you only create one base for all your sub-addresses, not a new base for every sub-address. So in my earlier example, if you wanted to sub-address ebay, amazon and hackernews you'd have huggybear-ebay@, huggybear-amazon@ and huggybear-hn@. The big deal is that huggybear@ != someone@ and sending to huggybear@ won't reach someone@ and likely earns you a place on their blacklist (or some points towards ending up there).