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Discussion on: How many email addresses do you use?

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

GMail for instance you can have an email like myname@gmail.com and when you sign up on a site you can do myname+nameofwebsite@gmail.com

Sadly, spammers and site-attackers know this trick.

  • Spammers, after they've harvested such an address, know that if they see "+", they can peel off the "extra" to spam you to your main mailbox
  • Attckers, if you've used a predictable "+", can predict what your other addresses might be on other sites ...so you still want to use unique passwords per site

GMail for instance you can have an email like myname@gmail.com and when you sign up on a site you can do myname+nameofwebsite@gmail.com

Heh... And has been valid for over 20 years — at least that's when Sendmail added it. You'd think over two decades would be enough time for people to get the drift. :p

GMail also allows for any number of dots in your name.

Sadly, support for that in gSuite seems to be lacking. Probably because they know a lot of companies like to assign .@. So, if you have a legacy Apps account for your personal domain, you can't use that trick to work past the fifty free aliases limit. :(