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Comment by amflare | Hacker News Reader

You can already do this with any normal email account. Just do myemail+whatever@domain.com. You can put anything you want behind the +, and it still works. i.e. myemail+chase@domain.com, myemail+huffpost@domain.com, myemail+facebook@domain.com.

This used to be used as some sort of automatic labeling system that was supposed to be part of the spec eons ago, but it works just fine for generating unique emails so that you can see if/when an email has been leaked.

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I think the benefit is supposed to be the locking feature. Any human that sees myemail+chase@domain.com and wants to circumvent your filters to get to your main inbox (typically for sales purposes) can figure out to email myemail@domain.com. With this product, the email is undeliverable unless they label their emails correctly.

Exactly. Even bots can strip the "+" and bombard you with junk. With a prefix inbox you can invent any suffix. I have a "service" prefix that I add suffixes to it when I need: "service-netflix", "service$bank", "service.newsletter-1". I don't need to pre-create each one, only "service" is enough and then any suffix locks to the sender. They can't sell your email. And they may never know to invent a new suffix because they don't know where the prefix starts. You can make it "sdfawetr" if you want.

I assume spammers have become adept at stripping anything between + and @ in email addresses, so this isn't as reliable as properly masked addresses.

That's been my experience too. That's why prefix inboxes allow any suffix, including "-", "_", "$", "!" etc.

The “x+tag@domain.com” format is also rejected by many validators, sadly. I thought this was a gmail feature, but was corrected[0][1] a while ago.

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5233

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952475

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