If you run your own mail server, this whole process is much easier. Just set up an alias name specific to whoever you're giving the address to; then forward it to your real email. If spam starts, you just delete the alias.
Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
#12What's stopping spammers from ignoring what comes after the plus?
Too much effort. They mostly go for fire-and-forget strategy. Any additional processing time means less sent emails = less profit.
What? It's minimal effort. 'Found' a gmail address? Drop everything after the + sign.
Spammers spend a lot of processing time on their emails (e.g. testing them against spam filters to tweak them to get through), so this extra step is so small as to be insignificant.
Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
#13What's stopping spammers from ignoring what comes after the plus?
its so well known and common, I would be surprised if spammers already weren't ignoring dots and the plus for gmail addresses
Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
#14I use the user+company@gmail.com alias when I can but MANY websites don't support that as a valid email address. Even tech companies that should know better.
Same here, but its better than what I hit the other day - the ptrchase form accepted my +'d email, but the sign in form wouldn't. I had to get their staff to change my email in their database just to get the thing I bought...
Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
#15For many years I've used my own domain for emails with a wild card forward to whatever my current email address is. So whenever I'm asked for an email address I use company@myemaildomain.com. So I don't have to worry about support for the + and no part of my actual email address is ever revealed. It also makes it easy for me to switch email providers.
I use the same approach. The only unfortunately side effect of doing so is that I have to deal with spams targeting at randomly generated addresses at my domain. Luckily Gmail's spam filter finishes most of them after some training.
Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
#16For many years I've used my own domain for emails with a wild card forward to whatever my current email address is. So whenever I'm asked for an email address I use company@myemaildomain.com. So I don't have to worry about support for the + and no part of my actual email address is ever revealed. It also makes it easy for me to switch email providers.
I use the same approach. The only unfortunately side effect of doing so is that I have to deal with spams targeting at randomly generated addresses at my domain. Luckily Gmail's spam filter finishes most of them after some training.
Tip: use a subdomain as your catchall (e.g. company@mail.example.com). I've been doing this for five years and haven't gotten a single spam to a random address. While there are various ways to learn about a domain's existence, subdomains fly under the radar.
Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
#17I use the user+company@gmail.com alias when I can but MANY websites don't support that as a valid email address. Even tech companies that should know better.
You can rearrange the dots in your username to create variations. err.or54 e.rror54 er.ro.r.54 then you can filter the variation to a less frequently checked folder.
Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
#18I use the user+company@gmail.com alias when I can but MANY websites don't support that as a valid email address. Even tech companies that should know better.
They _do_ know better (i.e. they know you use it for filtering) and that's why they don't accept it. I don't like it either, but it's a reasonable choice for them to make.
I honestly don't think they do know. It's more likely that some frontend dev just copy/pasted some email validation regex they found somewhere and called it a day.
Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use the same approach. The only unfortunately side effect of doing so is that I have to deal with spams targeting at randomly generated addresses at my domain. Luckily Gmail's spam filter finishes most of them after some training.
Tip: use a subdomain as your catchall (e.g. company@mail.example.com). I've been doing this for five years and haven't gotten a single spam to a random address. While there are various ways to learn about a domain's existence, subdomains fly under the radar.
Interesting! I'm gonna try it out and see if it works. But I'm wondering why?
Re: Avoiding Spam with Email Aliasing
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use the same approach. The only unfortunately side effect of doing so is that I have to deal with spams targeting at randomly generated addresses at my domain. Luckily Gmail's spam filter finishes most of them after some training.
Tip: use a subdomain as your catchall (e.g. company@mail.example.com). I've been doing this for five years and haven't gotten a single spam to a random address. While there are various ways to learn about a domain's existence, subdomains fly under the radar.
That is an awesome tip. I stopped using a catch all when folks were doing reflected spam (trying to get my mail server to 'bounce' the email back to the spam target).