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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

> I don't really know exactly, but she told me something about me using their stuff without their acceptance, when I tried to explain that's my own domain she told me I cannot use their name, because that's a copyright infringement. Weird.

I can't tell you how many non-techy people think I'm part of their company because I have yourcompany@mydomain. Sigh. Big companies have ruined the internet by having everyone have @gmail or @hotmail or something.

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The "best" is when you can't even sign up without having an account at a Large Company e.g. gmail or outlook. I'm not sure what that's supposed to prevent issues with.

Sure, you can add "+thing" after the username portion, but those that know this bog standard trick can still automatically derive your email address and get around your filters. At least with a dedicated username portion a human has to think for a second.

Which companies are those? Is there a list somewhere? The only time I ever encountered this was with AliExpress.

Did that change? My AliExpress account is using myname@mydomain.co.uk

I don’t know, I registered some time last year. Maybe it’s also the TLD? I have .me.

I've got a first@last.family. My dentist and several large companies refuse to accept this as a valid email address, so I have to use an email that doesn't identify me personally by name (uses efreak instead of my name). This annoys me every time I deal with them, especially since some of these sites use my email address as a username. I've been locked out from logging in on other devices a couple times for trying too many passwords when the problem was the address, not the password.

From memory, AliExpress wouldn't accept aliexpress@mydomain.com, but ali_express@mydomain.com was fine.

Interesting, so maybe I should have used a different prefix. Weird design.

I don't recall. I've only encountered it once or twice.

> those that know this bog standard trick can still automatically derive your email address and get around your filters

Not if you default the other way around and autodelete all mail that doesn't have a "+thing". :V

Which causes major problems with those sites that refuse to accept an address containing a "+".

If you use Gmail then you have a couple of ways besides using the + to make a variation of your email address that will still come to your inbox:

1) Use dots (period or full stop) between letters in the username part of your email address. For example, if your email is abcdefg@gmail.com then a.bcdefg@gmail.com and a.b.c.d.e.f.g@gmail.com also get routed to you.

2) Use @googlemail.com instead of @gmail.com in your email address.

I have a Gmail address and I use these other variations whenever a company rejects email addresses with + in them.

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