Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
by nybble41 on Friday January 04, 2019 @05:33PM
(#18828366)
There's a simple solution for that: always include a label as part of your address, and treat any mail that doesn't include one as spam.
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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
by matte_black on Friday January 04, 2019 @06:12PM
(#18828643)
Not every service even allows you to have a label in your email address. So what then?
Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
by nybble41 on Friday January 04, 2019 @06:49PM
(#18828877)
Get them to fix their broken systems? The concept of a "label" exists only in the user agent. To everyone else the '+' character is just part of the account identifier, and a perfectly valid element of any e-mail address. The entire portion before the '@' sign is potentially significant. If someone hands you an address [email protected], there is no guarantee whatsoever that mail sent to [email protected] will end up in the same individual's inbox—that could be a completely unrelated account.
On the e-mail provider's side, one way to work around such broken systems would be to let users generate random, opaque aliases which do not contain their primary e-mail username but route to the same account, with a predetermined label applied on receipt. These would look just like ordinary addresses and there would be no way for services to strip out the identifying elements.