This trick only works because it's not that popular. If a substantial amount of people started doing it, firms would simply start removing the extra +info that you pad to your address.
This could potentially be solved by using alias emails instead of just adding a tag to your normal e-mail address. I can imagine gmail offering a quick "generate alias" button that creates a EkTG522f3fhgtfh@gmail.com address that instantly forwards to your real address. Obviously you can delete this alias if you find that you are being spammed.
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if you use a gmail account, you can use a + after yourusername
So cpach@gmail.com and cpach+hackernews@gmail.com would both end up in the same inbox, then you can use gmail filters to separate them
This trick only works because it's not that popular. If a substantial amount of people started doing it, firms would simply start removing the extra +info that you pad to your address.
Good point. But I doubt any significant share of users will consider doing it. Most of them are of course unaware that it’s even possible.
Perhaps someone here has some statistics to share? It would be interesting to know how common this trick is :)
[Edit: Better wording]
This could potentially be solved by using alias emails instead of just adding a tag to your normal e-mail address. I can imagine gmail offering a quick "generate alias" button that creates a EkTG522f3fhgtfh@gmail.com address that instantly forwards to your real address. Obviously you can delete this alias if you find that you are being spammed.
Regrettably a significant number of back ends (principally Microsoft ones in my experience) regard the +bit as malformed and reject the email address.
Actually yes, I remember now that's why I use - in my Postfix instead.
Postfix allows you to choose any character as a separator.
Yep. But it can be circumvented if one’s mail server use another delimiter. E.g. ”.” will hardly be filtered.