Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts, to do data-poisoning

Re:Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts,... by itronitron on Sunday February 28, 2021 @03:48AM (#26291751)

I know at least one person who has their own personal family domain set up so that his family members can just create new email addresses specific to the vendor when shopping online (for example, '[email protected]' and '[email protected]' ). Then all their shopping emails just get routed to his domain. Being able to track which company leaked or sold an email address seems like another benefit in addition to catching all the marketing emails.

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Re:Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts,... by armedpacifist on Sunday February 28, 2021 @04:13AM (#26291877)

Gmail has this feature baked in. Append a + sign to the username and then append any string you want, ie. [email protected]. It will forward these mails to your regular email address. I started doing this for the exact same reason as mentioned above, but you can obviously do more than just creating honeypots. Also you have to ignore the fact that it's Google...

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Re:Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts,... by zaik on Sunday February 28, 2021 @04:25AM (#26291948)

There already exists at least one popular js validation framework which removes Gmail (and others) subaddresses per default in its "normalizeEmail" method: https://github.com/validatorjs/validator.js/blob/master/src/...

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Re:Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts,... by austinjp on Sunday February 28, 2021 @04:33AM (#26291988)

I do this. A small annoyance can crop up when trying to log in to a service with your + modified email address. Hmmm, what did I append after the plus? If you can't remember that, you can't use the "forgot my password" function either :)

Usually soluble, but irritating.

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