Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisgd | Hacker News Reader

My email is firstlast I use first.last for subscriptions I am unsure I want to keep. I can then filter out based on to address and also use diff combinations when I already know I don’t want them contacting me (firs.tlast) for example

View on HN

If you use the + character (e.g. `firstlast+subscriptions`) it'll still arrive to your `firstlast` inbox, but will allow you to filter it more meaningfully.

I've been using this trick for a while (usually 'firstlast+per_service_identifier') and I've encountered more than a few systems which erroneously claim that any email address containing a '+' is invalid.

That's why I now own my domain, and added the first([\.-]suffix)?@last.tld -> first@last.tld mapping at my provider.

For selfhosting, there's `recipient_delimiter = +-.` in postfix' config. [0]

The most infuriating ones are those where you can subscribe with the '+', but the unsubscribe function errors on it.

[0] https://try.popho.be/email.html

Also in many cases I am allowed to proceed with the +, but never receive confirmation emails because the sending system chokes.

You could encode the service_identifier in a pattern of dots around the letters of firstlast for cases where the '+' is not allowed. But that's probably hard to do in a way that's easy to encode on the fly, unless you already know morse or something similar.

Also doesn't work if I'm not using Gmail :)

I have used it all the time over a dozen years, both for site-specific email addresses and also for having lots of handy test email addresses in my personal app development. Often I just wish I had been more disciplined about using it even more for site-specific addresses, but fortunately more websites about friendly about unsubscribing these days.

I have a fun story about this.

I had an account on some site and didn't use it for years. When I go back and try to login they demand I reset my password and verify my email. Sure, no problem. Thing is I used a foo+bar@ email and they had a little sanitizing script running that removed it when submitting the form. Rewriting their spaghetti and getting the form to submit successfully was fun. I was very surprised it worked. Guess they weren't sanitizing on the backend.

Some services recognize this and do not allow email "aliases." One reason is that it essentially would allow you to sign up for an endless number of trials with the same email account.

The level-up for this trick is if you have your own domain, and a provider that lets you use a wildcard alias (Fastmail, for one), you can use anything@yourdomain.com. On the fly. No way to block that!

I like that idea. I use Fastmail, in fact. So I could use hn@yourdomain.com or any address specific to a service.

I guess the risk would be potentially not remembering that was done or exactly what was used. Also, could keep you locked into Fastmail or limited to providers who have this same feature.

Luckily, there's a lot of providers that offer this :)

I did that for a while, and then my provider decided that people using catch-all e-mail addresses were causing their systems to store too much spam and stopped letting people use them.

That left me in a slight bind as I had used well over 50 different e-mail addresses. I had switched to Gmail as my primary e-mail address, but hadn't bothered changing my accounts. Luckily, they allowed a very easy way to create forwarding addresses and basically set it up to forward 50+ addresses to one.

So “firstlast+@gmail.com”?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com