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joeyhageyesterday at 8:13 PM4 repliesview on HN

Completely agree - have you encountered this before? The Gmail plus sign alias trick has been widely known for a long time and, to my knowledge, still works well today. It would be easy enough for websites to either block + in gmail addresses or instead grab the true email.


Replies

cloudfudgeyesterday at 9:25 PM

Some sites that block "+" in email addresses are actually just doing it out of incompetence. My credit union, for example, will actually accept an address with a "+" in it, but nothing will work because some broken bit of web 1.0 plumbing along the way converted it to a space (it shows up that way on my profile page). I wouldn't be surprised to see "&nbsp" on my printed bank statements.

autoexecyesterday at 10:09 PM

Spammers know to just cut out the +whatever. It's a simple regex to keep those from even getting into a database.

ciupicriyesterday at 10:15 PM

Guess what? There are some dumb website or applications complaining that the email address is invalid.

SXXyesterday at 8:51 PM

Gmail also have "googlemail.com" alias and you can split your username with dots since they dont count like "[email protected]" and "[email protected]" are the same thing,

Nothing of it solves privacy though.