In gmail: click the down arrow thingy, then "Show Original Email". Look for the line that says "Delivered-To: [email protected]", and that the email it was delivered to.

If you have an email A forwarding to B, on B there will be a "Delivered-To: B", I think. I never got to understand where on the email source I can find if it was to A or B.

I agree with your point about unsubscribe links, but I don't see how it's not immediately obvious which of your multiple E-Mail addresses you need to unsubscribe with since it's going to be the one the mail was sent to.

For those with vanity URLs and GMail - the trick I use to manage unsubscribes better is to enable 'catch-all address' and registering for new accounts by their URL and TLD, e.g. [email protected], or [email protected], etc.

Two benefits - 1) easier to remember my login per site and 2) if I start getting spammed as a result of my info being shared with third-parties, I can attribute the original offender to the e-mail address.

Also a good way to get vast amounts of dictionary attack spam. One of the mail domains I host was accepting mail to all addresses for some years, and this seems to have attracted even more spam: the volume of junk it gets is disproportionately huge compared to the other similar domains.

My mail server allows -- as an alternative to + so my users can work around braindead address regexes.

You also get few hundred "new viagra price" in your spam folder sent to [email protected]. You'll never find [email protected] in that mess. Even worse is that you get bounced spam emails sent to [email protected] with from header sent to [email protected] and spam filter doesn't see them as spam.

Also, assuming the site isn't brain-dead and invalidating the address, you can use [email protected] with any gmail or google apps address.

That + is frequently a cause of contention though, so I use a . (which was done via config when I ran my own mail server days gone by) and also have a catchall on google apps.

If I were selling my database to spammers I would process my entire list to remove everything between the plus and the at sign.

Gmail accepts multiple forms of email addresses for a single account. [email protected] is identical to [email protected]. I often get subscribed to email lists I don't want using a variant of Gmail address that I never use. Also, plenty of people using forwarding addresses; it may not be clear which address was the target.

What you're saying is odd, because I own a [email protected] email address and I know the person that owns the equivalent [email protected] email address.

Also, the email address to which the message was sent appears clearly in the "To:" header.

This is not Gmail's designed or advertised behavior.

http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Either you or your friend is misspelling their address (more common than you might think, I get opt-in mailing-list mail for [email protected], intended for [email protected]), or you've encountered a bug.

You can put periods inside the username part of a gmail address and it still gets through. I'm not sure how what you're saying could be true? Maybe it wasn't always this way.

funny. Because if you own the address [email protected], I thought you also own [email protected].

The dots are for you to play around with, but the mail all goes to one account. Or, at least, that's how it works with my account.

Early first.last@gmail accounts had firstlast@gmail reserved for them. Google stopped doing that a few years after launch.

Are you certain? Im under the impression periods in email addresses, anywhere, do not affect delivery

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/1-awesome-gmail-tip-you-dont-kn...

Periods in gmail addresses to not affect delivery. other mail servers may behave differently.

I had no idea they stopped doing that! That seems a pretty serious change of model, I'm glad I know it now.

They didn't stop.

I thought it was the other way around: mail to [email protected] will be delivered to [email protected] unless [email protected] was registered early on.

Not always.

Google's own [email protected] mailing list has this as the "To:" field:

[email protected]

And at the bottom of the message:

To unsubscribe from this group, send an empty message.

I had to ctrl-u and check the "Delivered-To:" and "X-Forwarded-For:" headers before I could unsubscribe.

(I'd tried to unsubscribe previously but the subscribed email account forwards to my main account so replying with an empty message didn't work. This thread prompted me to dig a little deeper and finally get one less piece of email per day - thanks HN!)

Exactly, even if email is forwarded, the To: should still be intact.

BCC

Delivered-to is still going to be valid. You'll have to be able to read all email headers, though.

Sending a reply email message can still work just fine. Assuming they include the original message in their reply, you just need to embed an ID in the original message, and look them up through that.

in which case you've invested the effort in making the stateful one-time token for unsubscription (is that a word?) - it's EASIER to enact that via a web link than parsing response emails

It's only easier if the recipient is web browsing, and wants to risk getting cookies and malware from a known-malicious entity...

if it's a known malicious entity I don't think I'd want to confirm that my email address is 'live' either way ...

the majority use case here is that they're not malicious, merely spammy with good intentions.