Your Gmail Account (and other e-mail) Has Unlimited Addresses - Useful For Seeing Who Leaked Your Address to Spammers

You can append to your existing e-mail address in various ways, and this could be pretty useful for seeing who leaked your e-mail address to spammers. For example, for your bank, give them the address [email protected]. Then, if spammers send to that address, you can quickly see where they got the e-mail address from!

I’ve tested it with Proton Mail, and it works in exactly the same way.

See lifehacker.com/your-gmail-account-has-unlimited-a…

   

unix_joe,
@unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Most data harvesting companies filter out anything after the plus sign. Google made this easy for a reason.

It’s just easier to have an email service that allows multiple aliases.

peter,
@peter@feddit.uk avatar

I use cloudflare catchall emsil on one of my domains and have an espanso script which generates a unique email when I type :email

CephalonKappa,

I use Mozilla Relay. Thaz way i can also instantly block all mail to the compromised address

bugsmith,
@bugsmith@programming.dev avatar

I used to work for a product comparison company (think finance and insurance). We used to save the email address as typed for login and also with everything after the plus removed separately. For Gmail and certain other large providers, we also stripped out any dots e.g. [email protected] became [email protected].

WigglingWalrus,
@WigglingWalrus@feddit.uk avatar

Why?

bugsmith,
@bugsmith@programming.dev avatar

Sorry, I thought the rest was implied. Because the company also sold user data (and stated that in the T&C’s). The industry is very aware of email aliases and so it is more valuable to have sanitized data.

GadgeteerZA,
@GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org avatar

Now you can tell us who you worked for, so we can be sure to avoid them…

bugsmith,
@bugsmith@programming.dev avatar

I’d rather not dox myself. They’re not a huge company. I promise you that this is not something uncommon.

i_am_not_a_robot,

Unfortunately, many companies incorrectly validate e-mail addresses. Sometimes you aren’t allowed to register and sometimes you are able to register but then some things don’t work.

GadgeteerZA,
@GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org avatar

Yes I must say I’ve only had about two that would not register a plus address. Most others are just sending and then accepting a OTP response. Plus addresses are also working with my own domain e-mail.

saba,

I use aliases on my own domain. For example, for lemmy I might use [email protected] or for my bank i use [email protected]. Everything goes to the same inbox. There have been a couple times with job applications where I’ve had to reply and then they find out I’m not really [email protected] but I guess I could set that account up if I feel the need.

Redjard,
@Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

If you register your domain with njalla (which are also amazing for privacy and generally have great no bullshit dns management) you get a domain-wide mail forward with that, it’s a simple setting you can just toggle. Included in the 15/year (depending on your TLD) domain registration

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