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by tonmoy 3658 days ago
If a lot of people start doing this thing, then it will be trivial for an attacker to figure out name+service1@domain can be changed to name+service2@domain
2 comments

Same argument for port knocking. Absolutely ineffective against targeted attacks, but most attacks aren't customized and targeted.
It also cuts down on the attack surface enough to let you use more active alerting.
"service1" could be generated randomly as well, and stored along with the password in a password manager.

Another nice property of this suffix is that one can identify who gave away their email address / which site it was scraped from when receiving spam; not sure where I have seen this written down originally.

I think when spammers see a "+" they just strip everything after it down, i.e. me+spam@example.org -> me@example.org. Not to say many sites just don't accept "+" (or, worse, cease to accept such addresses).

Unique, non-guessable, machine-generated addresses are the way to go (do with emails just like password managers do with passwords), but no common person can use those, because they'll need a domain and self-hosted MDA.

E.g.

    $ echo "$(echo -en "secretsalt\nsome.example.net" | sha1sum -b | xxd -r -p | base36 | cut -c-8)@me.example.org" 
    h6t8490d@me.example.org
Or just generating random IDs and maintaining the database.

(Sure, HMAC would be a better idea than this string concatenation, but meh...)

Then I could just make my rand(service1) chars larger. No point in adding it to email address at all. Email leak (privacy) is an issue that this could help with but I do not see any benefit in terms of securing my account