[QuantumNomad_]

> using fake email addresses

What exactly is a “fake” email address here?

If I have three email addresses [e-mail], [e-mail], and [e-mail], are those “fake” as well, then? An email address doesn’t have to reflect your real name.

How about when I use iCloud Hide My Email to generate a unique email address when I create a new account somewhere? Is that a “fake” email address as well?

Or do they mean hacked email accounts that belonged to someone else? But then calling them “fake” email addresses still seems weird wording.

[applfanboysbgon]

A "fake" e-mail address is one that is not clearly tied to your real identity, citizen. There is no reason to use such non-identifying addresses unless you have something to hide. Comply, for the children.

[burnt-resistor]

Maybe a "fake" email address in their terms is an impossibly invalid one, unowned one that cannot be verified, or a disposable verifiable one? I'm not sure.

Fun fact: Gmail address prefixes can optionally intercalate a period between any letters. All accounts though must be remain unique after normalizing case and removing all periods.

a.bc@ = ab.c@ = a.b.c@ = abc@, but only one of these can be registered.

[phil21]

That is all email addresses, it’s part of the spec. Aside from broken implementations of course.

Periods are optional.

Edit: Woops yeah, meant pluses. Dots are somewhat common as optional these days but not universal.

[rahkiin]

False, this is only with Gmail. And not even true for Gmail workspaces.

[burnt-resistor]

Which "spec"? Many specifications exist and not every MTA, mailbox, nor email client understands the latest and every implementation is guaranteed to have quirks, but here are the most common: RFCs 822, 2822, 4952, 5336, 6530. There is no the spec. Subaddressing isn't standardized, but there was a half-hearted RFC on that with too many extra features. How email user parts are interpreted is up to the MTA, mailbox, or email client. Plus subaddressing informally as a hack has existed since at least 2005 according to my rusty memory. It's, therefore, a de facto standard. Use it where possible to track down leaks of personal information, but it's likely to bite with some gotchas. I used to maintain a @{{name}}.name domain and email server where all emails went to a single catchall account without setup or subaddressing needed to disambiguate which source email correspondence was from.

> Dots are somewhat common as optional these days but not universal.

This handwaving tautology is meaningless.

[fc417fc802]

He's talking about aliases, not independent email addresses.

[basilikum]

Are you sure you mean dots and not pluses?

[vunderba]

Could the article be referring to subaddressing? e.g.

  [e-mail]
  [e-mail]
  [e-mail]

I still don't really think this counts as fake emails, since it has legitimate use cases, but I suppose if their backend couldn't tell the difference and a single person used sub-addressing to sign up multiple times that you could argue that these are fake-ish.