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Comment by jonshariat | Hacker News Reader

If you have gmail (not sure what other providers support this), you can use + or . in your email address and add anything you want.

For example: myemail+twitter@example.com or myemail.youtube@example.com both go to myemail@example.com

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The nonstandard dot behavior turned out to be a really bad idea. I've had numerous instances of people signing up for other services (e.g. Amazon) with my gmail address, adding various dot combinations. Whenever I have contacted Amazon (or others) to report a security issue--that I have access to someone else's account because "their" email address is routed to me, I just end up having a really unproductive conversation.

I think you’re mistaken about how the dot works with gmail.

Last I remember, dots aren’t a separator like plus is, they just don’t count as part of the name.

So Gmail treats my.email@ and m.y.e.m.a.i.l@ as aliases of myemail@

Some email marketers are catching on to this approach though and automatically strip anything between “+” and the domain.

You could do subdomain aliasing instead (with Fastmail, or with Google Suite if you try hard enough) and there's no way to detect and strip that, since it looks and feels like a normal address.

It can be detected, just takes a bit more work (look up the domain's nameservers, see if they point to fastmail, if so rewrite the email address)

myemail.youtube@gmail.com would go to myemailyoutube@gmail.com (or my.email.you.tube@gmail.com). Gmail's email normalization is like: sed -e s/[+].*//g -e s/[.]//g

Assuming the vendor doesn't claim that having + is invalid. I've seen that quite a lot.

Not exactly so, dot in address is just ignored by gmail, so “myemail.youtube“ is equivalent to “myemailyoutube“, not to “myemail“. Plus sign works as you described.

I do that with ProtonMail, however anybody with bad intentions can remove the suffix. But it helps tracing leaks and lazy spammers.

Tons of places don't accept that as a valid email though.

Does it work with a dot too? Is this a Google Suite thing?

It works with a dot too, so:

exampl.e@protonmail.com == example@protonmail.com == e.xample@protonmail.com

This is a good guide on how you can leverage this technique to identify which website you signed up for, and who sold your email to third parties.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/7425v7/protonma...

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