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by Razengan 5 days ago
Oh fuck. I love Hide My Email and it's been the best feature about iCloud ever since it came out.

It's actually useful compared to Gmail's useless "yourrealaddress+alais" that gives away your actual email anyway, and it helped me catch quite a few spammers/data sellers.

Hide My Email addresses already have a peculiar format that others could guess, and some do block those, and there's no reason to add a blatant "private." tag.

This is a win for privacy-intruders, not users, just like Apple's iCloud Keychain API that has allowed Facebook, TikTok etc. to secretly track users across multiple devices and device reinstalls for years.
1 comments
jjice 5 days ago
FWIW it's not a gmail thing for privacy, but rather just part of the email spec. RFC 5233 talks about it.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5233/

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technothrasher 5 days ago
It all dates back to the Andrew Messaging System at CMU, developed in the 1980's. Originally the format was "<username>+<keyword>+<args>@example.net" where the mail server would interpret the keyword and arguments to route the message in whatever unique way that keyword would dictate (e.g. bob+dist+~/mailinglist@example.net would read the file mailinglist in Bob's home directory and deliver the email to addresses listed in it). If the keyword was not recognized, it would just deliver normally. So bob@example.net and bob+alias@example.net were equivalent, and could be used to filter after the fact if desired.
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rafram 5 days ago
> bob+dist+~/mailinglist@example.net would read the file mailinglist in Bob's home directory and deliver the email to addresses listed in it

The days before security sure were quaint!

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9dev 5 days ago
Did the RFC editor get a makeover recently? It looks familiar, but also kinda… polished. Neat.
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autoexec 5 days ago
When looking at a document I think it's all distracting/annoying. I still prefer plain text https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5233.txt
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