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Comment by blechschmidt | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the + is incredibly useful for tagging emails. When I register new web accounts, I always specify a new unique tag so that I can track down the source in case I receive spam. Furthermore, they help my mail server when filtering out junk mail.

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These days I do this differently; I created a subdomain that forwards all email to my main account. hackernews@foo.example.com would forward to main@example.com, and I can just filter the prefixes. That way I can use the subdomain for my own unique addresses, without interfering or using up addresses on the parent domain.

This is probably a better approach if your domain provider supports wildcard DNS records. My old provider did not and I am very glad I switched.

I don't need wildcard DNS, I have a catchall on a single subdomain.

I do this too. Unfortunately some spammers decided that they'd use <random>@<mydomain>.com as their reply address and I have to filter out all of their bounces.

I do as well. Keeps a nice track of which have been leaked (or guessed) by spammers. And easy mail filtering to relevant labels on my side.

But it does get awkward quite a few times when having to interact with a human (customer services, hotel bookings, etc) via email or phone when they get a bit confused why their company name is my email alias....

Spelling a long alias over the phone letter by letter is especially tedious...

Also responding to emails either means I have to configure yet another sender alias, or mostly just send from my normal alias, which sometimes gets rejected or confuse whomever I interact with.

Also hate unsubscribe links that insist on sending unsubscribe email from that alias(mailman etc).

Doesn't solve all of it, but that's why I use random localparts instead. Sometimes people wonder whether the address is correct, but if I confirm that it's ok that it looks weird, people aren't overly confused and just accept it. I then have it all integrated with Mutt so it tags emails with a human-readable label and automatically selects the correct source address when replying.

Same here, same (minor) problems. The human interaction part is pretty much covered when I used yourorg@mail.my-name.tld for registration, but the more provocative variation yourorg@spam.my-name.tld occasionally raises some eyebrows.

The nasty part is replying with the main address as the sender. I'd really love to have email clients with reasonable support for this usage pattern for the platforms I use, but maybe then the pattern might become popular enough to lose some of its advantages.

>But it does get awkward quite a few times when having to interact with a human (customer services, hotel bookings, etc) via email or phone when they get a bit confused why their company name is my email alias....

I had that problem so many times that I whipped up a quick Rails app that generates new email addresses. Type in the company name, hit submit. It uses a random project name generator gem to create something like SteelyFishSauce@<mydomain>.com, displays it on the screen, and emails "<Company name> has been associated with SteelyFishSauce@<mydomain>.com" to the spamcatcher address.

A lot of spammers will rip out the + tagging on a Gmail account. Probably works better if you have a domain in front of it via Google Apps.

I do not use Gmail but a self-hosted Postfix instance. I have configured an alias for tagged use only and configured Postfix to reject all emails to this alias without a tag. This means that currently any tag will be delivered but luckily, I am not receiving any spam to this address at all.

Originally, I wanted to create a Postfix filter based on an HMAC together with a browser extension which would simply let me generate new valid email addresses in the form of prefix.HMAC(secret, prefix)@example.com but I have never implemented it.

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