I wonder why there are no email providers that offer an infinite number of aliases that cannot be associated with the primary address. Simply offering any aliases would soon fill out easy-to-remember addresses, but can't email providers offer a feature to add a randomly-generated address such as 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6@email.provider? This way, users can use a different email address on a different web service when registration, which would reveal no information about the user and drastically improve users' privacy. In addition, it is easy to track down which web service is at fault in the event of receiving spams via sold user data.
Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365
121–129 of 129 posts
Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365
#122Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365
#123The process for sending email /from/ a + address is tricky. First -- in GMail at least -- you have to explicitly set up a + account as being in your list of "from" accounts and then you have to remember to use it every time you reply! Not to mention forgetting the email I gave them when resetting passwords sucks, too. "Was that foo+hn or foo+ycombinator or foo+ycombinator.com or foo+hackernews or... hm... uhhh..." (Y…
You can't even send from a normal alias in Office 365, so I'd be shocked if you'll be able to send from these '+' aliases.
Wow, that sucks.
I honestly don't see how that would work. Like, how would you unsubscribe to a mailing list? Most these days let you click a link rather than reply with "unsubscribe" but still...
I've had multiple occasions where contact /to/ a business needed to come from the email address I used to sign up with their service (automatic correlation to users I guess).
One particular exchange was particularly painful. Every email I sent was, I assume, routed to a new customer queue. Every email that I sent from my non-+ alias was delayed by days and then dealt with by an unhelpful "we don't recognize this email address".
It was very painful and it was all because I used a + alias as my supplied email address but kept forgetting to use it as my 'from' address.
Had I not had the ability to set it as my 'from' I'd probably have stopped using + aliases entirely.
Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
john...doe@gmail.com doesn’t seem to work though. I don’t think Gmail takes multiple dots.
Not just Gmail, that’s a syntactically invalid email address. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Local-part for details. But sure, you could have `(my name is)john."..".doe+spam(...)@gmail.com` if you wanted to. Syntactically valid! The parenthesised bits would be stripped out before sending, and I have no idea whether Gmail would be willing to accept the quoted dots bit.
Haha, I debated about throwing in the multi-dot address. Bummed that it was a bad example. :(
As for parens, I recollect the spec lets you nest your parens and quotes! It's insane. e.g. `f(oo."(bar."baz")."quux)@example.com` is valid in the spec.
I wrote an Oracle regex to parse for valid email addresses and I went against the spec rather than what is what's practically used. It was an insane thing.
Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365
#125I moved all my public emails from first@last.something to first.last@wellknownmailprovider and then spent a lot of time changing my email address in accounts that I've had a really long time. Shocked at how badly that went, actually. For certain service providers, I couldn't change my email address and was encouraged to open a new account, which would've meant losing certain records in the old accounts. I couldn't co…
What was your reasoning behind moving your emails to a public email provider instead of an email with a domain you seemed to control? I've been trying to move in the other direction and its been exactly as much of a pain as you've mentioned.
There's a long story here, but here's the short take:
Most of my email accounts are public email provider mapped to domains. But anytime I sign-up for something that's not tied only to one of my work endeavors, I use the non-mapped address. So, newsletters, sign-ups, Amazon account, etc. I don't use any mapped domains for those things, as those kind of come-and-go.
I segregate my personal email and my business emails from the @public-email-provider address, which I want to keep away from my other activities. It also puts all those mailing list emails, legal acknowledgements, etc., in one place as much as possible. I can filter and manage those in one place.
I also don't have a strong sense of personal ownership of that stuff. It's like a PO Box, not my house address. I don't check that account for human- initiated communication. That's my personal address (which gets almost zero traffic these days) and my work/business email addresses.
I have a strong aversion to the company behind public email provider. But I set a calendar reminder for a year out so I don't think about it much until then. I have some endeavors that will let me close up various business activities and centralize to one. If/when that's solid, I'll probably consolidate all my income-oriented business accounts and services [and probably somewhere else], but keep the public... as it's just a PO Box.
Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but I'm guessing because it's easier to remember than completely random email address (password manager might solve this?) and more unique than using the same email everywhere.
Yeah, thats exactly it, it allows filtering incoming messages into folders based on what I tell a shop and it makes it easier to remember what alias i used where
You can combine the shopname with a salt and store it in your password manager.
Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do prefix+12RandomLetters@blahblah and every potential sender gets it's own random address. Then I use filters to move mail to predefined folders. What's left is spam. If a mail comes in from an unknown sender to known address I know that the address is compromised. Ideally I would like to plug my password manager to generate an address and automatically add email filters in place. Although I was thinking about a s…
Do you ever need to give someone an address on the phone? I do. If you do, how well does your 12 random letter system work for that use case?
I use it only for services. If I have an actual person I give them my other (normal) e-mail.
Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use shopname@firstname.lastname.email, with my own lastname.email domain. Fastmail makes configuring your dns records for this super simple. It's always fun interacting with customer service reps when they for example confirm my email address... "errrrrr yeah so we email you at ourname@...?"
Why do you use shopname@? Once you know the pattern everyone can guess it.
Only a tiny fraction of people is in a position to do this. If it were really an issue, using the pattern `shopname_n`, where nn is different for every address, should do the trick. It's similar to encrypting serial numbers so they don't [German Tank Problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem) them.
Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done that for nearly twenty years now. Importantly, it allows one to trace how your email gets distributed and stolen.
Did you find anything interesting? I started doing this recently and did not find anyone misusing my email so far and am now wondering if it's worth the extra effort.
A decade ago I found the unique email address I used at Hertz.com leaked for spam.
Of course when I complained they said it must have been something I did...