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by dripton 581 days ago
Words great, until a page rejects email with a '+' in it.
3 comments

Or just knows about this Gmail trick (it's been 20 years already) and sends spam to your real mailbox.

Actually, I am surprised _any_ spammy website these days would even honor the part after the +, and not just directly send to the real mailbox name.

I used to require a "+..." on all emails. Any email that didn't have the "+..." was sent to Spam automagically. My family were whitelisted. I gave up, because too many websites (early on) refused to take the "+..." marker, so I ended up losing too much to Spam. It's easier to just let Google sort it out.
Good resource on this trick from 2010. It's not Gmail specific.

https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/plus-signs-in-email-a...

It's part of RFC 5233 Sieve Email Filtering: Subaddress Extension
Not everyone's cup of tea, but quite nice if one can afford it: I have my personal domain and a catch-all inbox. So if I want to register at acme-co.xyz I will just use acmecoxyz@my-domain.tld

Maybe I should start using random words though? Wonder if someone will go bananas seeing their brand's name on my domain.

Yeah, I've had to explain that a couple times already, usually when dealing with customer support or in-person registrations.

And a "malicious" actor can get away with pretending to be another company by spoofing the username if they know your domain works like that. I don't think this has reached spammers' repertoire yet, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Eventually I'd like to have a way of generating random email addresses that accept mail on demand, and put everything else in quaraintine automatically.

dots are ignored, can filter by john.doe@gmail.com

not sure about capital letters