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Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

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Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#151

Post by greengreengrass »

picofarad wrote: post #144
greengreengrass wrote: post #119

I, too, get so frustrated by + addresses not working that I’ve configured my MDA to rewrite —- (double hyphen) to plus, and use this in spite on sites that dislike the + variant. I’ve made it impossible to /not/ host my own mail delivery infrastructure now if I want every address I’ve ever given out to still work. Although more recently I’ve moved to a catch all domain for throwaway, which is even better. It confuses…

What's the most common thing you hear when you do this? Usually its nothing, but the second most common thing is: "no, sir, your email address." It gives me the fuzzies every time to explain I own the domain, and every email address on it is mine. Since I have it on my phone, I can usually receive the email that they send very quickly and prove that everything's working fine. I am wondering how hard it is to do this…

The best one was when someone said they were going to give me excellent service because “you work for corporate”, confusing the company name before vs. after the @ sign. I forget which company it was now but the agent was convinced I must be someone important.

I was torn between explaining and letting them believe it :-)

Most of the time, folks just don’t understand why their company name is in the address and they think it’s a mistake.

To be honest, I do tend to avoid this for anything other than throwaways because it causes too much confusion when I have to phone up, and I’m not really doing it out of a misguided belief it helps with spam (at least, it doesn’t help any more than security by obscurity is unsuitable as a singular defence, but maybe has a tiny role when layered into a broader strategy…)

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#152

Post by layer8 »

account42 wrote: post #106
layer8 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I’m opposed to opinionated validation as well, you seem to be missing the issue it tries to solve, which is the user mistyping their email address, not receiving the verification email, and either thinking everything is fine, or thinking that the process is borked, and in any case not proceeding and not becoming your customer. The goal of opinionated validation is to inform the user about an incorrect email add…

You could do soft validation that provides protection for common mistakes while still allowing users to use domains you didn't expect. "Did you mean layer8@gmail.com instead of layer8@gmailc0m [Y][N]".

Indeed, “do you really mean that?” would be useful, though I would always have the user type the correction themselves, because too many users would select “Yes” without thinking or attentively verifying.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#154

Post by alkonaut »

Validation to avoid mistakes is, as they point out, good. I'd even go so far as to extend it so that I reject those without any tld (without any dots) just because it's 99.999% a mistake and I don't care about the person who has ben@net. I'd also reject ip numbers.

Next is the spicy take: I need to consider WHY I am gathering this email?

If I'm gathering it for "marketing purposes" or any such cross correlation to other systems, then I'd also reject bob.smith+dontspamme@gmail.com. Or I'd keep both so you can do cross referencing on both the + address and the "raw" one.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#155

Post by macintux »

riddley wrote: post #42

I have a gmail address that at least three other people think is their address. I constantly get emails for the dumb stuff they sign up for. NONE of them ever have an "I didn't request this" link. I mean, I get it. That won't make them money, but oh man is it annoying.

I've become email acquaintances with two people who have similar iCloud addresses as mine, since I've been forwarding their mail for years now.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#156

Post by dathinab »

> Punycode [...] and the local-part was still limited to ASCII.

the funny part is this is only half true

The true part: Punycode has never be standardized for the localpart and as such taking a email address with non us-ascii characters in the local part and punycode encoding it is fundamentally wrong.

But: Nothing prevents you to have a local part which "happens" to look like punycode and especially in the early SMTPUTF8 days many providers which did allow non-us-ascii email local parts automatically created an "alias" email address where the local part was punycode encoded. Nothing in the standard prevents this and as consequence punycode encoding a local part _might_ just happen to work for some subset of non-us-ascii emails.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#157

Post by FLHerne »

greengreengrass wrote: post #151
picofarad wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the most common thing you hear when you do this? Usually its nothing, but the second most common thing is: "no, sir, your email address." It gives me the fuzzies every time to explain I own the domain, and every email address on it is mine. Since I have it on my phone, I can usually receive the email that they send very quickly and prove that everything's working fine. I am wondering how hard it is to do this…

The best one was when someone said they were going to give me excellent service because “you work for corporate”, confusing the company name before vs. after the @ sign. I forget which company it was now but the agent was convinced I must be someone important. I was torn between explaining and letting them believe it :-) Most of the time, folks just don’t understand why their company name is in the address and they t…

I find it's convenient for knowing which companies have immediately - and illegally, in this country - sold my details on to third-party spammers. Makes it easy not to do business with them.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#159

Post by eks391 »

picofarad wrote: post #146
scottmcmac wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I do the same, but without the catchall for exactly that reason. If I start getting spam, the e-mail gets disabled.

Smart, what server / service do you use?

Look up email alias service or something similar, if you aren't looking to self host. I can't recommend the service I use, because I'm grandfathered in to my plan, and their current plans for new customers suck, but there's enough providers out there that you should find something competitive.

If you want to 'self host' on a provider, I thing cheap/free options are available from cloudflare, Google, and similar enterprise companies.

If you want to truly self host, I don't have experience, but this guy who does gave a great thorough answer for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073510

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#160

Post by dathinab »

> Note: I have struggled to verify this one, and it’s possible I’m actually misreading the RFC.

Is correct, you can have quoted local parts and (I guess?) theoretically "foo"@mail and foo@mail should even be treated the same.

But practically this is a dead feature and probably should be treated as non existing.

AFIK `[Also interestingly the `[..]` syntax has a generic extension hook, and that hook allows usage of @ characters. So technically a `foo@[custom:@@@@@@@@]` is a valid mail address, just no one knows how to deliver it ;). (And `custom` must be registered with IANA, theoretically).

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