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Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

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Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#161

Post by mrighele »

gonzalohm wrote: post #134
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…

How do you deal with sending emails? When I was self hosting my emails would be flagged by Gmail (or any other email providers) so I effectively only had a self hosted inbox, which sucks

Not OP, but I self host a few domains.

I was worried about not being able to send emails, but is seems that as long as you setup properly SPF/DKIM/DMARC you're fine. You may have problems if using a domestic address though.

For the configuration, the best bet is probably to use a product that makes it easy to configure the above three, there are a few alternatives around, like Stalwart [1] or docker-mailserver (which is little more that your postfix/dovecot/rspam combo packaged in a container) [2]

[1] https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart

[2] https://github.com/docker-mailserver

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#162

Post by ale42 »

An e-mail address can have multiple @ also for... source routing. Of course it doesn't make any sense nowadays, but it's technically allowed. RFC 5321 gives an example:

  @hosta.int,@jkl.org:userc@d.bar.org
This is a valid e-mail address, with source-routing along two intermediate servers. I guess no sane server on the Internet will accept this, but you never know... (this said, I remember attempting this around 1996, when many servers were open relays, and the message was happily delivered after passing through 3-4 servers).

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#163

Post by wang_li »

cjs_ac wrote: post #86
gerdesj wrote: post #13

Email is just like physical mail and thankfully just as endearingly human (sometimes). Once upon a time (1970/80s) I lived on and off in a mystic land called West Germany. Our postal addresses ended with incantations such as BFPO 40. Around 1985ish my granny send a Christmas card to us. I should note that she was at this time nearly seventy and sadly suffering from Parkinsons. She addressed the card, in rather crabbe…

Bill Bryson claimed to have received a letter addressed to ‘Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire’. I have some cousins who live in a small town in Australia where the houses have neither names nor numbers. You just address the envelope to ‘ , , ’, and it’s the postie’s responsibility to know where everyone lives. (‘Postie’ is the official job title in Australia Post because it’s gender-neutral.)

Until 2025 Carmel-by-the-Sea in California had no street addresses. The houses have names or you just have to know who lives in which building. They also didn't have postal delivery, they all had to go to the town post office and pick up their mail.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#164

Post by mjmas »

dathinab wrote: post #160

> 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 @…

From my reading through the RFCs a few months ago the message and smtp envelope also have different rules for addresses, and the message allows the local-part to contain whitespace but the envelope doesn't.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#165

Post by genewitch »

eks391 wrote: post #159
picofarad wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enter…

I'm paying $15/yr currently for a catchall, plus the domain. I think new customers get charged $50+ a year, maybe even closer to $100.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#166

Post by dspillett »

frereubu wrote: post #79

We have a UK client in the healthcare industry who registered the domain clientname.healthcare, and they rapidly found that the NHS imposed regexes which rejected name@clientname.healthcare emails. Aside from regexes though, I also think the new TLDs confuse quite a lot of people. name@clientname.healthcare just doesn't click as an email address as quickly as name@clientname.com, and I'm in tech so I'm sure it's much…

> rejected name@clientname.healthcare emails

For years I've had a catch-all subdomain to give out addresses like company@sub.domain.tld which makes filtering out the junk when companies invariably sell their email lists or get hacked much easier. It is getting rarer, but I still occasionally run into sign-on forms that don't allow more than one “.” after the @ unless it is due to a recognised two-part country suffix like .co.uk.

I would never use something that isn't a country TLD for email for this reason, I assume there are a lot of bad systems out there that will incorrectly see them as incorrect.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#167

Post by tracker1 »

I have a relatively good email address, and more than a handful of people who don't seem to understand email, just use my address... I've had payment confirmations from mlb.com orders, to tractor supply receipts and junk mail, to student loan paperwork. It's amazing how much garbage I see all because nobody actually confirms email address ownership before signing people up for crap.

The worst is some foreign gambling site, I can't even log into to change the preferences and cancel the account.

Though, I did deface then delete someone's dating profile once, who signed up on an app with my email...

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#168

Post by tracker1 »

ashley95 wrote: post #24

This is cute and all. But for anyone coming here for real-world advice: just use a regex, normalize to lowercase, and surface any errors to users so they know if their email got rejected. This will avoid 99.9% of issues and work for 100% of real human users. This is what everyone else does, and if you have a user with an esoteric email, they will still be able to furnish another one that passes this validation.

Verify all email address entries before you start using it... I absolutely HATE how much garbage I get because a few people don't understand you actually have to get an email address before you start using whatever you like.

Re: Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses

#170

Post by dathinab »

mjmas wrote: post #164
dathinab wrote: post #160

> 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 @…

From my reading through the RFCs a few months ago the message and smtp envelope also have different rules for addresses, and the message allows the local-part to contain whitespace but the envelope doesn't.

both allow it but only if you use quoted text AFIK

through the message does allow an additional display name (like `display name `) which has it's own rules.

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