Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by alexkus on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @04:12AM
(#4909290)
The + trick is becoming well known with spammers anyway. I registered with one site as "[email protected]" having never used the "[email protected]" address anywhere and within a few days I was getting spam to "[email protected]" and "[email protected]". Whoever got that list of emails was clever enough to know to try removing the + portion.
Obviously you can never give out the "[email protected]" address and then assume that everything that goes to that address must be spam, but I've had legitimate contact from companies who have had to email me by removing the + portion because their internal email system wouldn't allow addresses with a + in them.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by rhizome on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @01:13PM
(#4911575)
They're getting a little wise, but that didn't stop me from receiving spam to "[email protected]" a few weeks ago.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by driverdan on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @11:23AM
(#4910850)
I've been using catch all's for years. I get 100+ bounced spam emails a day from people spoofing my domains (also have DKIM + SPF). AFAIK none of my domains have ever ended up on blacklists and no one has had trouble receiving legit email from me.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by pygy_ on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @12:35PM
(#4911337)
Good to know, thanks.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by pseut on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @09:54PM
(#4908356)
fastmail.fm lets you set up wildcard mx records -- so if your email is [email protected], you can get email at [email protected], [email protected], etc. instead of [email protected]. I imagine other email providers do this too.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by usefulcat on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @10:14AM
(#4910390)
Yes, I have my own domain and have been doing this for years. It generally works as expected, and so far I've had at least four unique addresses that were leaked to spammers. One of them was the address I used for newegg.
If you do go this route, I'd recommend using a whitelisting approach. I do get a lot of spam sent to random addresses at my domain.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by MertsA on Thursday December 13, 2012 @01:22AM
(#4914561)
I've also had personal information leaked through NewEgg. For me it was my name and my parents email address when I got them to buy me a video card when I was 16. Eventually they got an email addressed to my full name and their email about car insurance rates or some random spam. I would really think NewEgg would be better than that.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by alexkus on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @04:13AM
(#4909293)
Hmm, that's a useful tactic as I'm seeing + addresses becoming much less effective due to the reasons I gave above.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by bathat on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @08:39PM
(#4908130)
I think a lot of sites have caught on to the + trick, though, because more are more disallow the + character in the email validator.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by pyre on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @10:21PM
(#4908432)
More like laziness. They probably only allow something like:
^[a-z0-9_.]+@(?:[a-z0-9-]+\.)+\.[a-z0-9]+$
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by jfoster on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @03:30AM
(#4909212)
In my experience it's been ignorance rather than laziness. I suppose you could argue that the root cause of the ignorance is laziness. If someone is writing a validator, they probably ought to check what constitutes valid input.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by rhizome on Wednesday December 12, 2012 @01:17PM
(#4911600)
It's not a sign of catching on, but of using an old email validation pattern from the days of Matt's Script Archive (seemingly). It's the sign of a website that has used cargo-code programmers. You're probably just seeing it more because you're trying to use plus-addressing more often (confirmation bias), but it's been this way for years and years. It's actually better now than it used to be.
Re:You’re not anonymous. I know your name, email, and company.
by kefs on Tuesday December 11, 2012 @09:23PM
(#4908278)
I wish they wouldn't..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Valid_email_addr...
I use Google Apps (possibly not a good idea but soo convenient :/) with a catchall. I didn't catch any offender so far...
However (off topic), spammers are spoofing addresses as if they were coming from my domain. I receive two to three dozens automatic replies from mail servers (this address does not exist...).
I've properly set up DKIM and SPF records, making it obvious that these mails are spoofed, but I'm afraid my domain will end up on grey/black lists... Anyone out here familiar with this kind of issue?