You can append to your existing e-mail address in various ways, and this could be pretty useful for seeing who leaked your e-mail address to spammers. For example, for your bank, give them the address myaddress+banking@gamil.com. Then, if spammers send to that address, you can quickly see where they got the e-mail address from!

I’ve tested it with Proton Mail, and it works in exactly the same way.

See https://lifehacker.com/your-gmail-account-has-unlimited-addresses-1849809691

#technology #email #antispam #privacy

  • Unfortunately, many companies incorrectly validate e-mail addresses. Sometimes you aren’t allowed to register and sometimes you are able to register but then some things don’t work.

    • GadgeteerZAOP
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      38 months ago

      Yes I must say I’ve only had about two that would not register a plus address. Most others are just sending and then accepting a OTP response. Plus addresses are also working with my own domain e-mail.

        • Redjard
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          28 months ago

          If you register your domain with njalla (which are also amazing for privacy and generally have great no bullshit dns management) you get a domain-wide mail forward with that, it’s a simple setting you can just toggle. Included in the 15/year (depending on your TLD) domain registration

  • bugsmith
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    58 months ago

    I used to work for a product comparison company (think finance and insurance). We used to save the email address as typed for login and also with everything after the plus removed separately. For Gmail and certain other large providers, we also stripped out any dots e.g. a.j.uniquename@gmail.com became ajuniquename@gmail.com.

    • GadgeteerZAOP
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      28 months ago

      Now you can tell us who you worked for, so we can be sure to avoid them…

      • bugsmith
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        38 months ago

        I’d rather not dox myself. They’re not a huge company. I promise you that this is not something uncommon.

      • bugsmith
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        68 months ago

        Sorry, I thought the rest was implied. Because the company also sold user data (and stated that in the T&C’s). The industry is very aware of email aliases and so it is more valuable to have sanitized data.

  • @noodlejetski@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    that very much depends on your email provider. while it works in Gmail and ProtonMail, it doesn’t on Tutanota. just double check before you start using it.

    also some websites don’t support the + sign in an email field, and others have apparently learned to ignore it and everything that comes after it. something like Anonaddy/Simple Login/Mozilla Relay would probably be more likely to work. they generate a unique, random e-mail address that you sign up with, and then forward the emails to your main inbox. but then again, some services don’t accept emails from their default domains as valid/safe.

    • @Canard
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      11 year ago

      E-mail providers could configure another character for subaddressing, broadly accepted in forms, but they stick to this plus sign sadly.

      I think about trying to buy a domain name, and playing with catch-all and ignore rules to avoid spam while creating a custom subaddressing setup on a custom domain. Source: this Mastodon post https://chaos.social/@silmaril/108878671259313909

  • Kromonos
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    31 year ago

    I wonder why so many people found this option just now, because Gmail supports it since the beginning.
    I configured my own mail server the same way. This mail tags are a great option to organize the own inbox. Works amazing, when the server also supports sieve.

    • GadgeteerZAOP
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      51 year ago

      Well I can answer that because I just read about it today and thought it was quite interesting. So many still don’t know about it hence the post.

        • Kromonos
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          31 year ago

          Sorry for you both. It wasn’t meant personally, but more in general, because so many people don’t know about that feature.
          Ok, it’s not advertised very much, either.

  • @unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org
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    38 months ago

    Most data harvesting companies filter out anything after the plus sign. Google made this easy for a reason.

    It’s just easier to have an email service that allows multiple aliases.

  • Big P
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    28 months ago

    I use cloudflare catchall emsil on one of my domains and have an espanso script which generates a unique email when I type :email