this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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Isn’t it pretty widely known that many email providers support this?
I just assume spammers would know enough to remove everything from the ‘+’ until the ‘@‘. It’s not like they’re trying to be sparing with recipients. Why not just send to both?
Personally I'm not a fan of "plus aliasing" because it gives away your base address, and it's trivial for spammers to strip the alias. I prefer aliases that completely hide the base address.
Its also VERY poorly and haphazardly handled in websites. Often they won't let me create an account with it. Or I will be able to create an account using the alias, but then I am left unable to login.
That's why we need formal rules. Once regulations are in place (with big penalties) websites magically start to function properly.
Yes. It is pretty easy to work around, but if that is the only tool you have it still can be used to junk a majority of the crap.
If you want a robust solution you can use disposable aliases (which are basically randomly generated) or signed addresses.
I do the latter. So I would generate an email like
[email protected]. If you strip or change the string at the end (which is a small HMAC) your message will go straight to junk. It isn't perfect because there is only 4 bytes of entropy in the signature but a dedicated attacker will find a better way to spam me anyways.