Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 129 posts

Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

#31

Post by ACS_Solver »

giomasce wrote: post #20
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #2

I understand the appeal of this feature for sorting, but it seems ineffective for things like "figure out who sold my email to the spammers" because everyone knows about it and it's elementary to just trim off everything after the plus sign. Unless you do some kind of verification and filter email sent to addresses without a valid suffix?

Since I have my own domain, I receive all emails addressed at whatever@domain.com. Of course, different values of "whatever" end up in different directories, and should one of those display an insufficient SNR, it would go straight to /dev/null. This way the "proper" address, i.e., the one that goes to the actual inbox, is not easy to extract. The hard part is social acceptance. This morning the Whirpool technician w…

I also have my own domain and use a similar setup, with some grouping, such as:

home@domain.tld is for anyone and anything dealing with my physical home. Delivery of an appliance, repairs, homeowner's insurance and such. I expect the email volume here to be low except when ordering something.

fly@domain.tld is for any flight reservations. That's pretty convenient, I can find any old tickets or travel details by filtering for this address, and I also know any incoming mail is likely an ad, unless I just bought tickets.

hotel@domain.tld is for all hotel reservations, and is even more convenient. Unlike flights, I never need any emails from hotels except to see that my stay has been confirmed.

And on the rare occasions I expect to need a throwaway email, I'll use somethingrandom@domain.tld and point it to /dev/null after receiving what I needed.

Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

#32

Post by account42 »

jeremiahlee wrote: post #25
scrollaway wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such services are likely breaking the law. Edit: Downvote me all you want, they're still breaking the law… In the US there's the CAN-SPAM act ( https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can... ) and nearly every other country has similar laws. Most of them require one-click unsubscribes to work. It's still failure to comply even if it's due to negligence/ignorance/incompetence.

How exactly should I go about dealing with Universal Pictures Home Entertainment under the CAN-SPAM Act? Individuals cannot sue under CAN-SPAM Act and I don't think any state Attorney General is going to bring a suit on my behalf because they didn't accommodate a plus alias.

Send them a letter stating that they are spamming you and hope they will fix it?

Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

#33

Post by account42 »

usrusr wrote: post #8
iggldiggl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curiously enough, so far I've only ever observed the reverse happening - spammers somehow ending up stripping off the common prefix and leaving the individual suffix intact. (Though on the other hand thankfully I'm still not getting much spam anyway and it's only a few addresses that were affected, so I only have a limited amount of data to go by.)

Not really surprising: in the eyes of a naive regex for extracting email addresses from a string, a+b@c.d contains a nicely email-looking substring b@c.d but a@c.d isn't contained at all. Spammer address supply chains aren't usually characterized by the highest levels of sophistication.

Could also be url decoding of the non-urlendocded email which would convert the + into a space.

Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

#34

Post by gruez »

tedd-the-tiger wrote: post #19
jeremiahlee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree with this technique, but it’s not possible due to the high number of services that don’t permit “+” in the email address or break because they don’t URI encode it. I have several services I will never be able to unsubscribe from because of the latter—and yes, I tried manually URI encoding it and changing the form fields with dev tools.

I've long held the thought of having a mailbox that receives [everything]@[domain], except certain blacklisted addresses. As certain addresses get spam and/or I lose interest in the business I gave the address to, I add them to the blacklist. So far, I'm using AWS SES, which seems to be focused on the sending of marketing emails, and are not fussed on receiving, but includes rudimentary blacklisting. So far, it's zer…

How is it set up with SES? AFAIK they don't provide a POP/IMAP interface.

Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

#35

Post by tyingq »

snorremd wrote: post #14
ahalam wrote: post #5

FastMail had some of the cleverest ideas for plus addressing. username+tag@fastmail.fm could be given away as tag@username.fastmail.fm

I used this for a few sites, but then stopped as I realized this would be a pain to change if I ever wanted to change to a different email provider. Wish every provider would support this as I’m sure spammers have caught on to the plus addressing scheme.

This should work on gsuite, for example, if you use your own domain and set up a route for unknown users.

Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

#36

Post by thomasedwards »

randunel wrote: post #27
throw0101a wrote: post #10

Finally. This has only been allowed since RFC 822 (1982). Is there any reason why Microsoft did not support this from the beginning (of Exchange)?

I've been using "Microsoft 365" since 2012, outlook w/ a custom domain and all the grandfathered features. The +tag has always been supported, and I can't really tell what the difference between "Office 365" and "Microsoft 365" is, since the latter appears to include the former, if not identical.

Same as the difference between a Microsoft account, a Microsoft Passport, a .NET Passport, and a Windows Live ID.

Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

#38

Post by kop316 »

metaphor wrote: post #22
ahalam wrote: post #5

FastMail had some of the cleverest ideas for plus addressing. username+tag@fastmail.fm could be given away as tag@username.fastmail.fm

Why couldn't spammers just: s/(\w+)@(\w+)\.(fastmail\.fm)/\2@\3/g ...or equivalent?

In that instance you can. What is also nice though is if you have a custom domain, you can set the custom domain to do the same thing AND have an alias.

So for me, I have a few emails in my custom domain:

{firstname}@example.com

market@example.com

(there's others, but it's not relavent to this discussion).

market@example.com just goes straight to spam, as I don't use that email for anything. foo@market.example.com is used for each email instance. It works out extremely well.

Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

#39

Post by amf12 »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #12

Now if only websites will stop rejecting plus-addressed email addresses as invalid. The most frequent offenders are mom & pop websites that you just _know_ are going to get breached.

You can also use this with a "." (email.spam@gmail.com) in Gmail.

Re: Microsoft adding support for custom '+' email addresses in Office 365

#40

Post by cm2187 »

It reminds me a gag from the last season of What we do in the shadow. A character puts a toothpick on his lip and suddenly none of the other characters recognise him.

Like if spammers and hackers were not aware of the + notation, and like if it wasn’t trivial to extract the underlying email address by removing anything after the +...

Unless you have an alias that completely obfuscate the underlying email, I just don’t see the point.

Post reply on HN